I’ve been making calendars almost every year since 2014. At first, they were “zodiac pinups,” which is exactly what it sounds like. I was going to Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School sessions every month and had tons of drawing inspiration.
When I first started going to Dr. Sketchy’s in 2010, I was so out of practice, it was a huge learning curve just to get back to the skill level I had in art school. The poses only lasted between one and 20 minutes, getting progressively longer over the course of three hours.
By the end of the evening, my drawing hand would be numb, and my other hand would be sore from holding a drawing pad in my lap. My shoulders ached from the unfamiliar posture, but it was always worth it.
For a while I finished my favorite drawings at home, using colored pencils. Then, I started leaving them black and white, and finishing them using fine line pens, then scanning them in and colorizing them in Photoshop. Game changer!
My first two calendars featured the simplest drawings, just colored pencils with Photoshop filters and plain backgrounds. In 2016, I started adding heavily stylized photographic backgrounds and editing them until they blended with the artwork.
I liked playing with different background images, transparencies, symbols and fonts, textures, and layers until the whole composition took on a surreal quality. Over time, they became more like collage art than pure drawings, and I loved the puzzle of adding different elements and reconfiguring them until I was happy with the result.
Every piece tooks hours, and some techniques worked better than others, but back then I didn’t have any other hobbies! I wasn’t roller skating. I wasn’t working out. If I wasn’t at work, I was playing video games or drawing.
Zazzle
For the first couple of years, I used an online service called Zazzle to make my calendars. It was free to create an account and it was a lot like RedBubble, but much less artist-oriented. People were offering their designs for sale, but most of it was more like custom wine mom coffee mugs than actual art.
But I wasn’t really interested in selling my calendars to the public at that time. It was mostly for myself and a handful of friends and family, like a complicated way to do custom Christmas presents. The quality was fine, but the interface was clunky.
What I liked was how easy it was because they had ready-made calendar templates you could just upload your artwork into, choose a font and a style for the calendar grid pages, and off you go (this was way before Canva).
Badass Goddesses
In 2018, I switched from Zodiac Pinups to Badass Goddesses, mining the world’s mythologies for the fiercest female deities and bringing their stories to life with burlesque artists as models. I loved the aspect of researching and finding a variety of goddesses from different parts of the world every year.
I took the advice of a friend and found a local printer, switching from Zazzle to what is still my favorite local print shop, Minuteman Press in Vancouver. Every year when I call to get my new calendars started, they exclaim, “The Badass Goddesses!”
The only problem with going to a local printer vs. going through a website like Zazzle was that now I had to create the calendar pages from scratch, no templates. I would search for a passable (free) template for MS Word, save it as a PDF and combine it with the artwork, but the calendar pages were very plain and utilitarian in those years.
After covid, I had a crisis of creativity. Dr. Sketchy’s was no longer happening, and I had managed to find inspiration by using several drawings of myself in 2021, but I didn’t do a calendar for 2022. Besides, now I had hobbies… I was outside all the time, skating and getting exercise for the first time in years.
Then halfway through 2022, my partner Rodger was showing my website to a friend and she just about lost her mind when I told her I wasn’t drawing anymore. She literally shamed me into rebooting Badass Goddesses, and for that, I will be forever grateful!
My 2023 calendar was half reprints of old favorites and half new artwork, but it reignited my desire to create something every year.
Pinktober
In 2024, I did Inktober/Pinktober for the first time, and suddenly I had a whole collection of new drawings. They were a very different style from what I had been doing. Rougher, less polished, but faster, easier. That was fun for a couple of years.
The aspect ratio changed with the medium. I had a small square drawing binder for Pinktober, and I did all my drawings with colored pens, and when I made my calendar, I scanned in my favorites and made the most minor of digital adjustments.
It was quick and dirty, but it was better than nothing. And to my surprise, my friends were happy to snap them up! Last year, I got a free preview of Canva and made a considerably more polished final product, with one important caveat…
I was making my calendar in October 2025 and the template I liked was for the current year, not 2026, so I had to manually go through every single month and change the dates so they matched the correct upcoming year. I checked and rechecked intensively, and sent it off to print…
But sure enough, one month later, one of my friends tells me he found an error on the calendar page for December. The entire grid was off by one day! Aaargh, fucking horrifying. I immediately printed a new, corrected December page, bought a box of manilla envelopes and tracked down everyone who bought a calendar to give them the corrected page. A Virgo’s worst nightmare.
2027: A Spoiler-Free Preview
So this year, I’m using the newest tools (while still paying for nothing but the printing). Every piece starts with an original pencil drawing, which is colored with pencils, felt and acrylic pens, then this year I’ve digitally enhanced the backgrounds and perfected the textures.
I found a free version of Photoshop called Photopea, which is basically an online clone of Photoshop. It’s a little slower and doesn’t have all the newest features, but fuck it, it’s free!
I know many of my friends don’t like to see the artwork until they turn over each new month, so out of love and respect for them, I’m just sharing a couple of pieces that didn’t quite make the cut here.
I even found a free online PDF converter. I don’t know how long it’s been around, but I never thought to search for something like it before. With PDF24, it was criminally easy to upload all my artwork and calendar pages, drag them into the right order and export them to a custom page size. (Honestly, easier than using my old hacked version of Acrobat Pro ever was.)
The best part is the calendar grid pages, which I used AI tools to create, matching the color schemes of each accompanying piece of artwork (yes, I’ve checked and rechecked the dates!). The results are next level. My 2027 calendar is 95% finished, just a few more picky little edits and I’ll be ready to send it to the printer.
Badass Goddesses 2027 will be on sale in mid-October… Drop me a note in the comments, DM me on Instagram or come find me in person to reserve yours!