45. Designing Pangolin Tea Cards

It's time again to send out a tea card to friends and family. A tea card is a little card I send out that includes a packet of tea and some news. It doesn't happen every year which makes it special to send out and share with others. For the tea card design for 2026, I was inspired by a charming African animal called the pangolin.

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A tea card is a small tradition that I made up to celebrate my friendships. It deviates from the usual christmas snail mail round-ups because I never send them out around the holidays which creates a fun element of surprise. AND I normally include a packet of tea with it to create a special sensorial experience for the reader. In the letter itself I do a little bit of what everyone does in regular letters: I share stories, write silly ideas, spill new thoughts and ins-and-outs of wherever it is I'm living as an expat.

In my last tea card I honored our arrival to Namibia with a pastel safari design. The tri-folds of the letter collapsed into a layered illustrated landscape. I had a ton of fun creating the whole coordinated ensemble - envelope, letter, sticker, tea card. The coloring was playful and pastel which on hindsight confused some of my readers into thinking it was a baby announcement! Seriously unintended consequences of color choices. Sorry, Momola.

So for this year I decided to follow a little pangolin muse. Why? Because I think pangolins look adorable. And even though it took a while to figure out how to draw them, I think they turned out really cute. (And I'm secretly hoping I can reuse the illustrations to print a puzzle and raise funds for the Pangolin Research & Conservation Foundation.)

Pangolins are small animals - two of the six remaining species are found in Africa. They are some of the only mammals to have existed during the age of the dinosaurs! They are ant and termite eaters with long tongues that unfurl like a party horn into nests to stick and lick up all the ants and termites. They have a outer armor of overlapping scales that look like roof shingles.

left to right, 1) sketches of pangolin curl 2) full page of pangolin sketches 3) sketch of pangolin shape @thesmarti

Pangolins walk with their hind legs, torso hunched over with their front claws clasped. I read someone once say a pangolin looks like an elderly person walking out to their garden. It's quite endearing. But took a long while to figure out how to draw them. Thankfully, there is a Netflix movie called Kulu's Journey about a pangolin rescue in South Africa. So I used a lot of reference shots from the movie to draw a pangolin standing, walking, rolling, curling, etc.

For this project, I really loved learning about the pangolin's keratin scales. (Technically they are no different than our hair and nails - but some asian markets consider them a fertility superfood of sorts. ::sigh::) So, after a couple of sketches, I had this brilliant idea to do some iridescent painting of the scales. But then I realized I don't know how to do that. And I lost confidence and started to spiral and procrastinated on other projects.

left to right, 1) first pangolin paint attempts, 2) simple pangolin sketches, 3) final pangolin illustrations @thesmarti

In the end, I had to go back to the original sketches, and simplify. I decided to do a base a chocolate color and then added in purple, pink and orange highlights. Then I crafted half loops for the curving stroke of the scales over it all with a hard pencil. In effect, the painting layer still makes it look like a direct shine on their backside. It still sort of works for what I needed.

I wrote out a quick letter to share the news since my last tea card in 2024, and then scrolled through my list of contacts and wrote out addresses. Ironically, this is the hard part since not everyone is good about updating me their new addresses! I have to do a lot of follow up - "Is this still your address? I hope so because I'm mailing tea cards shortly!" Then a long visit to the post office to stack and send out all the tea cards.

And voila - they are on their way!

simple pangolin 2026 tea card design @thesmarti

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Designing a tea card really tickles me. I love the idea of making paper ephemera that is special and enriching for someone to have and hold. Of course, I do feel connected to someone through the act of letter writing itself. But I like to think that the tea card helps my friends and family be uniquely present in taste (tea), smell (aroma), touch (paper) and sound (playlist) and sight (art/words). It gives people a lovely little art escape WHILE ALSO feeling connected. And that's something worth sharing.

Cheers to keeping snail mail traditions alive,

smarti