a comic about pilling my cat, I mean child

Hi friends! Long time no newsletter. But, you know. Waves vaguely in the direction of all the dumpster fires

I realized last year how much I was missing art in my life. During my decade as a face painter, I got to paint a LOT. I remember sitting outside at countless festivals on perfect summer days in Oregon and thinking I can't believe I'm getting paid to sit out here and paint all day. (Even IF "all day" was literally 12 straight hours with no breaks. I was young. My back could take it.)

So I've been taking classes at my local arts center. (Sidenote: the community is SO wonderful. Highly recommend finding your own local arts center and taking something!) I set up a teensy tiny art studio in an unused corner with the smallest IKEA desk I could find. And I'm drawing and painting again.

Making day-in-the-life comics, and monster paintings, and etc etc is cheering me up. And I hoped some of these might bring a bright spot to you, too. I further hope that many of you are also making tiny bits of art (also including: crocheting, cooking, gardening, doodles on grocery lists......), and that you'll tell me about them. Social media's getting all weird and annoying and it's gotten harder to see what the people I care about are actually doing.

Anyway, if you want to know what I'm doing, the answer is we all came down with the flu like dominoes - first kids, then grownups. Patient 0 (below) had it the worst but is finally back at school today:

Patient 2 (I guess? Do you count starting from 0? At any rate I was the third to get it) is currently in this state:

So that's the immediate state of me. (I hope you all are better.) But despite temporarily having the plague, I'm really happy to be drawing and painting again, and I look forward to sharing some of those stories with you. <3

xo tina

ps: if the newsletter formatting looks a little different it's because I was previously using Mailchimp and Patreon and now I am moving both of those to Ghost in a hope that it will be more streamlined for me. There should be a button around here somewhere to hop off this train if it is no longer rattling down the track you want to be on. Or something like that. Metaphors, man.