Category: updates

Urban Sketchers International Symposium 2026: A Volunteer’s Experience

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Recently held in Toulouse, the Urban Sketchers International Symposium came to into conclusion a few weeks ago. These have been the four (five, if I count the day I volunteered to pack the goodie bag items) busiest days of this year for me. I have never been so physically tired in a long time but I have never been so happy either. Being a volunteer at the symposium is easily one of the best experiences I could possibly have as an artist!

It all started when I wanted to join last year’s symposium in Poznan, Poland, but realized it was already too late for me to register, and that I had other holiday plans as well during that time. You can just imagine how ecstatic I was to find out this year’s symposium was going to be held right where I live!!! And that they would need volunteers. Volunteering for something that I’m passionate about has always been in my blood even when I was still living in the Philippines. I’ve volunteered for ecotourism, education for children, and even for kiddie cancer patients (which was heart-breaking). And now, I’m volunteering for art in one of the most artistic and beautiful places in the planet.

I applied to be a volunteer for the symposium during the last quarter of 2025, if I remember correctly, and then I heard from them in January saying that I was short-listed, and finally accepted to be one of the sixty lucky volunteers! I was so, so, so happy. We had a couple of meetings after that, and I was also accepted to volunteer for the goodie bags packing, which was so much fun.

We packed the goodie bags on Bastille Day, which is a national holiday here in France. All twenty of us were so excited to unpack the boxes, arrange them properly on the table, form an assembly line, and fill in the yellow bags with all the goodies, all 900++ of them!

We were supposed to finish late in the afternoon, but we finished hours in advance because we were so fast and efficient. Thanks to the help of volunteer coordinator, Amelie Demange and all the admin and staff working with us during that day.

As a volunteer, you get to see the behind-the-scenes of (almost) everything, and also get to know the wonderful people behind the organization, and of course, the faculty. We also get to have our free lunch, and our own lounge / resting area. And of course, all the goodies in the goodie bag from all the sponsors, and more:

As a volunteer, I got to assist in one of the demos and one of the workshops. I also got to attend on one of the workshops. They were all very interesting but I was really too distracted and too tired to follow the workshops and the demos, and I even forgot to bring the proper art materials with me because I always had to rush in the morning, not used to waking up very early and I would be so exhausted coming back home from volunteer work that I would just eat and sleep when I got back home. But still, I was able to sneak in this quick sketch and a watercolor doodle of Saint-Sernin Basilica while assisting a demo from one of the faculties from all over the world, even without my usual plein air painting kit. I made do with the sketchpad that was included in the goodie bag from leuchtturm1917, which they actually engraved with my website URL for free!

I also had a chance to watch Stephanie Bower on her talk about perspective. She also did some book signing one day, and so I brought all my books for her to sign.

There were a lot of other well-known artists there doing the workshops and demos, etc., but I mostly enjoyed assisting Barbara Luel in her demo at Place Wilson. She was the nicest, warmest, most charming faculty member. And I am just so glad to have been assigned to assist her.

I actually did not know that there would be a lot of walking involved, even though I avoided volunteering for the sketchwalks. It was Urban Sketching after all, so I should have expected to walk outside with the faculty and do the sketching / painting plein air!

One of the highlights for me was when we all went up onstage to accept a warm round of applause from everyone during the closing ceremony.

I have never done anything quite like this before. I don’t think I would have the stamina to become a volunteer again, but I think I just might go to the next symposium in Toronto, summer next year. And if I ever do, hope to see you there! 🙂

Thanks for dropping by! Cheers, and have a good week ahead!

Watercolor Art Retreat, Lanzarote, Canary Islands

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As a loving treat to my wonderful self this year, I booked this relaxing Yoga and Watercolor Art Retreat in Lanzarote, Canary Islands in Spain. It was organized by Lucia of The Sun Collective. We had four days of very informative art classes by watercolor artist and Sennelier Ambassador, Catalina Rodriguez Villazon. I did not care so much about the yoga, though. It was too early for me to join, and I was always sleeping so late, or in the wee hours of the morning, for some reason. Probably because I was not used to the complete quiet, except for the howl of sea breeze at night.

The place was gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous! And I had the most beautiful room of all, with the beautiful view of the sea, and the surrounding volcanoes. It was a few steps to the dining / recreation area, with the huge orchard down below.

The food was wonderful, the service was exceptional, the place was magical! I had the most wonderful time with wonderful people, and it was one of the best experiences I will cherish most. 💖✨

Botanical Watercolor Art Retreat in Teyssode, France

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So, I just got back from a wondrous, week-long watercolor art retreat with Harriet de Winton here in the South of France.

I spent a full week interacting with a small group of lovely people from different parts of the world — mostly from North America, and the UK. And I got to meet and chat and learn first-hand, up-close and personal some watercolor tricks from Harriet herself, who stayed with us in the same location.

First of all, the venue, Domaine d’En Naudet was lovely. The hosts, Nicolas and Sophie, are a lovely couple who own the estate. My spacious room was kept clean every day (very unusual in these parts, except in hotels), has huge windows and is conveniently located directly in front of the hall where we hold our daily (almost) watercolor sessions with Harriet.

Each meal (lunch and dinner) was specially prepared by a British chef (forgot to get his name) but he said he works only with uptrek (the event organizer), and that he has a food truck somewhere in Teyssode or Albi. I should look him up. He was really good. As for the wine, and the wine trip and dégustation, I was not so crazy about it, and really quite disappointed. Although, I appreciate that they are trying to promote local wines.

All in all, I had the most enriching experience and wonderful time painting and relaxing and walking around the neighboring village of Albi, which I had not seen in ten years! It was worth revisiting.

Thanks for dropping by and have a lovely weekend!

Happy Holidays 2022

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Hey there! I know I’ve been slacking on posts lately. My new job has taken over most of my time lately. But since, it’s the holiday season, things are getting a bit more slow-paced at work starting this weekend. So I’ve taken the opportunity to post a watercolor painting demo, finally!

In this video, I was inspired by the Christmas lanterns that I found in Ikea here in France. They remind me so much of the Christmas lanterns that we have back in the Philippines (Parol), I just had to make a watercolor version of them in a Christmas greeting card.

Since I’m always missing the tropics, especially, the beach, I’ve created this tropical themed greeting card. If you guys are interested, I sell some greeting cards, and other gift items with my original watercolor prints on them on zazzle.com. Mostly, Filipino themed. This year, I am so happy to have sold quite a lot! I’m finally going to be able to cash out my earnings! 🙂 What a treat. Thanks to those who patronized my humble artworks.

Hope you have a great holiday. Cheers!

My Birthday in Paris and Yoyo Ma Concert, etc.

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Last month, I celebrated my birthday in Paris with the hubs and some friends. We stayed at one of our friends’s very lovely apartment, which overlooks the Eiffel Tower. It was wonderful!!! I didn’t wanna leave the room with the view. 😀

We also saw Yoyo Ma at the Philharmonie de Paris. We booked the ticket early this year, and it was almost fully booked! We were still lucky to get seats third row from the stage, facing the front. Here is a video of some of snaps and video shorts I took during the mini-breaks in the concert.

The Philharmonie de Paris was majestic outside, but a bit disappointing inside. But I still had fun watching the concert. It was a birthday gift from my wonderful husband. We had a great time despite the noisy people in the audience violently coughing and sneezing all the time. It was so nerve-wrackingly distracting. I do not know how Yo-Yo Ma managed to keep his calm and cool throughout all the noise. And having said that, I think it will be the last time I will be watching him live. It was too distracting. But it was a real pleasure seeing him live in the flesh. Best birthday gift ever!

Lastly, a bit of update on the job hunt: before going on this trip, exactly a day before, actually, I received a very good news from one of the companies I have applied to. I started working two weeks after this trip. I was ecstatic!!! I have been on the job for two weeks now, and so far, I’m still not disappointed. It’s a great company, one of the biggest French IT Consulting companies, and my client is the biggest aviation company in Europe. Also, I’m working on their big data platform, doing Data Engineering until the end of this year. After that, I might go into another project, of which, I do not know yet. 🙂 I am quite happy. C’est fini, la tristesse.

Cheers, and have a good week ahead!

Fiesta Filipiniana in Le Triadou, France

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My friends and I, together with the Philippine Honorary Consul to Occitanie, Jeffrey Cabuay, went on a trip to Le Triadou, in the South of France to attend a Filipiniana Festival and Art Exhibit. This is a Philippine Festival featuring a programme with Philippine folk dances, and folk songs. There was also an art exhibit, where my artist friends and I contributed some artworks.

The event was organized by the Filipino association, “Tanglaw” (Guiding Light), with members mostly living in Montpellier, France, and around the area.

It was very refreshing to see young people (Filipino students) being very active in the event. There were also some participants and guests from surrounding European countries. It was all very entertaining, relaxing and enjoyable. Even the variety of Filipino food being sold at lunch time were delicious! I had such a great time in this event.

Here are the watercolor artworks I have submitted for the exhibit:

You can get more information about them here:

https://springfugue.com/pahiyas

https://springfugue.com/gumamela

https://springfugue.com/paintings

Also mentioned in my vlog:

https://phinaymarket.com for shopping online Filipino items https://www.zazzle.com/store/springfugue for shopping my online Filipino themed artworks

Thanks for dropping by and have a good day! 🙂

Face Detection App Deployment on Heroku

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Yesterday, we had our group’s meeting with our Python Machine Learning Labs teacher to update him with the progress of our project. We are building a Face Detection Application that we could either deploy on the web or as a mobile application. For my part, I used my Data Science (DS) classmate’s model that was pre-trained on SSD MobileNet V2 FPNLite 640×640 with 50000 steps (~0.7s per step)​ for my web app deployment.

Here is a snippet of the meeting’s recording, showing the part where I presented my work on react.js web app that I have deployed in Heroku using Github workflow actions, something we recently learned this week on our DevOps class.

The teacher was not happy with react.js app due to the overhead of the browser. Heroku was also not the best place to deploy the web app. He was also a bit confused about my colorful bounding boxes coz I was randomizing a list of color codes to display it. He thought it was some error with the detection. LOL! He suggested instead that we go with AWS technologies, Lambda functions in particular, and use Python instead. I think that this was a good exercise for me, and the group. Even though, we are not going to use this deployment in our project, it was interesting to use what I have learned this week in our DevOps class on the subject of CI/CD, and using Github workflow actions. 🙂

Here is the link to the Heroku deployment, if you want to check it out: https://diversity-face-detection.herokuapp.com/

Note that the app takes some time to load, and you will have to allow access to your camera. Also, sometimes, you might need to reload the page to see the bounding boxes.

Mont Saint-Michel Watercolor Painting Demo

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Hello everyone! How have you been? I hope you’re one of the chosen few who managed to escape the ire of Omicron. It seems to be very much omnipresent and omnipotent these past few months. Only the hashtag blessed (according to some instagram people) have managed to slip through unnoticed.

I, myself, have been under the weather for the last few days now. It’s not COVID, though. Just the common flu. The symptoms might be even worse than Omicron’s, though. I have been feeling like somebody slapped me around the whole night, every morning I wake up. My whole head hurts, especially my eye sockets, my scalp and even my teeth! I got nasty joint pains the first night. I hardly slept. From time to time, I get sharp nasty pains in my ear. Maybe I should redo the auto-test to check if I really don’t have COVID.

Today, I feel much better, though. I now only have a bit of cough and colds, and I sound a bit like Marge Simpson (or a bit like the sexy French Lola voice you usually hear on French TV doing the voice-over on magazine shows (think Edith Piaf!)… only in France! 😀 ) when I talk. That, and despite the fact that I’ve unwittingly wiped out clean my entire local project folder with all my Python Labs Machine Learning codes in it yesterday morning. Who does that?!!! I wanted to slap myself, but my sickness was already making me feel as if I have been slapped around enough already.

What’s good about all these is that I managed to get some free time (no classes also last Thurs and Fri) to paint again. I have been postponing for the longest time to paint Mont-Saint Michel. My family and I had the occasion to visit this magical place up in Normandie during the summer.

I painted it in a loose, quick, relaxing and fun way, as usual. I don’t want to take my paintings too seriously. I just want to have fun doing them. That’s the most important thing to me.

Thanks for dropping by. Cheers, and keep safe, everyone! 🙂

Random Thoughts and Updates

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Hi everyone! I hope you’re all having a good holiday. As for me, I have a three-week school break at the moment. I am only on my first week but I have already finished doing THREE out of FIVE exams. It’s not fun but I’m surviving. I find this course very interesting. I have learned so much in a span of three months! We had classes on Python programming, Machine Learning, AI and Data Laws (very sensitive, touchy subject), Applied Maths (Calculus, Algebra, Matrix Manipulations), Statistics and programming in R, Databases (which was a very good review), etc.

So far, my favorite was Artificial Intelligence and Data Laws. We talked about AI for Good, The GDPR, Patents on Algorithms, Ethics and Morality. I am suddenly ever more aware and conscious about all the information that I share about myself and my loved ones online. I’ve started deleting pictures of myself and my immediate family, which I wouldn’t want anybody (especially my classmates) to see while trying to scrape for image datasets for our school projects! LOL!

As for the Maths, I am still trying to catch up on Calculus. I never really had a strong background on it since, first and foremost, I never really realized before how fascinating it was when I was first introduced the subject. My interest in Maths, back then especially, Calculus unfortunately heavily relied upon my interest in the teacher conducting the class. I would say that my Calculus teacher was mostly absent, treated us like idiots, except for maybe one or two people in the class, and shamelessly collected money from students in exchange of a passing grade. I can only hope that she really needed the money. Otherwise, I hope someday she grows a conscience.

I never totally hated Maths, I was really interested in Trigonometry and even Algebra when I was in HS and College. In fact, I always like to watch a lot of videos about Maths. This one today, I found very intriguing, touching, and surprisingly poetic...

This video talks about Incompleteness and how, after a certain point, we keep getting back to the problems of infinite loops, who guards the guards and turtles all the way down. This might just be connected to this gnawing, nagging thought that I always get whenever I look out into space, especially looking up at night and just seeing blackness and the stars… it always, always makes me wonder whether I am looking outside, trying to see what’s way out there or I am really way outside trying to look deep within.

What do you guys think?

Also, in the spirit of total randomness… just wanna say that, it’s always difficult to find that balance in a conversation among friends where each person talks about himself/herself just enough. Sometimes, I feel like I’m being interrogated when I talk to French people. They almost always do not share anything about themselves but like to ask questions instead. I guess it stems from the fact that in most (non-Asian) cultures, it’s considered bad form or impolite to talk about oneself all the time. While the people from my home country are just the exact opposite. Filipinos almost always just talk about themselves. Never really even asking you even a simple, “how are you doing”. We were never really taught a lot of social graces, especially when it comes to oversharing and talking too much about ourselves. Tough. Not sure which one I prefer.

Anyway, hope you have a wonderful Christmas! Hopefully, I’ll be back again with some watercolor video with a Christmasy vibe. Ciao for now.

Watercolor Painting of Santorini

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Finally, after almost two years, I managed to travel outside of France once again. My family and I stayed in the lovely island of Santorini in Greece for a week during the school holiday. We stayed in this beautiful apartment in Pyrgos, a quiet area in the middle of the island, away from the bustle of the touristy areas of Oia and Fira.

We had a lovely view of the sea, some of the islands, and the mountains from the balcony of our Airbnb apartment. The view, and the Bougainvillea flowers at the entrance of the apartment inspired me to paint plein air on the balcony, one day, when I had the occasion to take a break from our usual walks.

I had so much fun, and felt so relaxed doing this watercolor painting of a scenery in Santorini. It was actually inspired by this picture of myself standing under the lush and lovely Bougainvillea of our Airbnb apartment. I just edited it a bit to make it look more interesting in the painting.

Me and my bougainvillea tree

Hope you are all having a fun week. Thanks for dropping by! Cheers!