It’s another birthday comic! 🥳
(no, today is not my birthday…it’s actually in October! but these take me some time to make.)
This is the second on my “birthday comic series”—you can find the first one here. It was quite a year, but all’s well that ends well, right? right…???
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!!
This year, Hourly Comics Day got moved a week to February 8th—which happened to be the very last day of my week-long vacation. Overall it was a good day, with lots of stay-at-home adventures!
…
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 variations 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)
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… 😌💦