How do you illustrate an adult child living at home?

That was the brief Salini Perera faced for Diana Ballon’s parenting feature in The Globe and Mail this month and her answer is disarmingly simple. Perera picked the easy evening over the difficult conversation, and trusted readers to understand why. Three smiling faces gathered around a board game, takeout containers stacked in the background, a contented cat draped across a lap. This is the version of intergenerational living the article suggests is possible and Perera makes it look like somewhere you’d want to be.

Perera builds the scene in a grainy, hand-textured style that feels like a memory, with a warm ochre-and-olive palette that softens every edge. Her line work is loose but confident and small touches like the spinner wheel and the cat sprawled across a lap give the picture a lived-in specificity.

“Beyond the basement: A parent’s guide to (happily) living with adult children” was published in The Globe and Mail on April 23, 2026. Illustration by Salini Perera.