Art & Comics

Painting some trees

This morning was my first time attending a ✨ botanical sketching meetup! ✨

It’s a local group that meets once a month in different parks to draw/paint some nature. I’ve been wanting to paint outside more AND I’ve been wanting to share with other artists, so this was a win-win situation! Plus, there’s something about “go paint around the park and we’ll meet back in an hour to show what we did” that really forces you to focus lmao…..

I got to draw and paint 3 different trees in an hour, which was…surprisingly faster than I expected? Like, what do you mean I can draw and paint a tree with watercolors in about 20 minutes? That’s not even too long! And it’s fun! I should be painting more often!!

On self-promotion

The demons are back! 😈✨

I’m really enjoying how this is turning into a series…a really slow one, where I draw an average of one comic per year, but a series nonetheless. It gives me a lot of time to let ideas simmer before I commit to them—I must have written about 10 different variation of the text on this, until I found one that clicked.

(last updated on February 6, 2026—edited the background to make it look less busy)

Drawing with a broken arm

On July 22nd I broke my arm after falling out of a car, just as I arrived to Boulder, CO for a planetarium conference. Yikes! First time breaking a bone, first time going to the hospital in another country…

(yes, I had travel insurance. NEVER EVER EVER travel without insurance! this could have gone very badly!!)

Despite this being a serious fracture, I got pretty lucky—I didn’t need to go through surgery, and it was my non-dominant arm. Silver linings, right?

After getting back home I found myself with a lot of time and not much to do, so I naturally gravitated towards my sketchbook…it felt relatively easy to do with one hand (except for the part where I can’t use a ruler), and it just felt good to draw for fun, you know? it’s like “oh yeah, I LIKE doing this!”, who knew!!

The bones painting was done in acrylic gouache, using a 3D model of my CT scan as a reference—you can see it’s horribly broken, but all the pieces are in place! I went into this painting with absolutely no expectations, and then it turned out surprisingly good… am I a bones person now??? (probably not)

Anyway, I still have MONTHS of rest and physical therapy before I make a full recovery, but I’m making good progress! It’s all time and patience now… 😌💦

Thirty-two


I’ve been thinking of doing some kind of yearly self-portrait for a while now, mostly inspired by illustrator Rebecca Green. I just really like the idea of having some kind of register of where you are at a certain time, both in terms of your own work and your perception of yourself.

But then I had this feeling that seems to be common among comics people: making an illustration that is not a comic is so hard! It took me a while to figure this out, even though it sounds really obvious—I’m a cartoonist! Of course my self-portrait has to be a comic! And so, as I turned thirty-two in October 2024, I started writing this. The layout/script didn’t really come together until January, and then… I just slowly, slowly chipped away at it until it was finished, closer to my 33rd birthday than to my previous one.

It’s funny to look at myself back in October, thinking I was going to do ✨ all of these things ✨ after the book was finished, without knowing that it would take me ten months just to finish this 4-page comic. Partly because a lot of things have happened, but also because the post-book burnout hit harder than I expected it to. But, it’s finished now! And I can feel myself slowly coming back to comics, which is a big relief.

Hopefully the next comic in this series won’t take me so long to make! We’ll see how that goes.