Hi everyone,

It’s been three years (yikes!) since I last sent a newsletter, which is scary. A lot has changed in that time! (In the world at large… another yikes… and in my own art life.) In case you forget (although probably not, because I think most of the people on this newsletter list know me personally), I’m Julien Coyne, an artist who has done a lot of different kinds of art over the past ten or so years, many of which were documented in this newsletter from 2020-2023.

I have wanted to reboot this newsletter for a long long time, but haven’t managed to really do it yet. I have a draft in my phone’s notes catching you all up on the major things I’ve been doing, but the main thing stopping me from wrapping it up and sending it is that I’m very intimidated to collect photos of what I’ve been up to (even a very limited number of photos) to include in the newsletter. I have been very very photo-organizing avoidant in the past several years, which is kind of a problem. But I won’t go on a tangent about that.

The big updates from my art life since 2023 are, one, that I came up with a little brand name for my art endeavors, “Rose Acolyte” (Rose Acolyte website here):

And two, that about a year ago I joined a collective of needlepoint designers (Saturnalia Stitching) which takes care of selling my designs as needlepoint canvases. Needlepoint is a weird little industry if you’re not familiar with it (needlepoint section of the Rose Acolyte website has a bit of info, and again, will go off on a tangent about what needlepoint is and what the industry is like at some point in the future, hopefully), but it’s been probably the most serious/successful art endeavor of my life so far. (Probably because the owner of Saturnalia, Abbey, is really lovely and very invested in supporting the designers’ success, so I’m motivated to not give up, and also someone else is taking care of all the logistics of selling things for me, lol.)

ANYWAY, the big point of this newsletter is that I’ve been trying to figure out new sustainable and enjoyable selling-art ventures for Rose Acolyte this year, and I was motivated to try out doing a snail mail “club” (although it isn’t really a club since it won’t be a subscription membership or anything right now) after making a bunch of digital prints for a mystery box that Saturnalia did for some of my designs recently.

It was fun making them and packing them up to mail out, and I wanted to try out doing it again. So I wrote a very very short zine, am going to do a little gouache painting this week, and am going to mail people this zine and a print of the painting at the end of June if they want to get a one-month mail club pass. It’s $10 and I’ll send your letter anywhere in the world (although it might take like two months to get to you if you aren’t in the US, and I can’t promise its safe arrival, I’m just going to send it in a letter untracked with a regular stamp).

You can sign up here on my ko-fi page if you’re interested. I’m only going to leave this sign up page up until tomorrow morning EST (June 23) (I posted about this mail club on instagram a week ago and put off sending a newsletter about it until today… I’m sorry…), but I will be preparing the zines towards the end of the week, so if you see this email later in the week and feel FOMO, you can just tip me $10 on ko-fi instead and email me your address, and I’ll send you a letter too.

Ok that’s it! I gotta put photos in this newsletter and send it! I miss writing to you!! I need to do it again more often soon!!!!!

Julien

PS. Look at this enamel keychain and washi tape I designed recently!!