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:
Hey guys! It’s been sooooo long! I had been so so busy with my Master’s degree, especially the last three months! It felt like ages since I last posted here. And it felt like I have aged five years the last three months due to my overly hectic schedule and overwhelming course projects, assignments, exams, etc! But my classes finally ended last June. And although I still have some projects and exams to accomplish, I managed to squeeze in a couple of weeks’ holiday with my family.
We toured the West Coast of the United States, driving from Los Angeles, to Arizona, Utah, Las Vegas and San Francisco. We visited so many, many beautiful places like Venice Beach, The Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend and Lower Antelope Canyon in Page, Arizona. We also went to Monument Valley in Utah, Bryce Canyon, Mammoth Lakes, Yosemite Park, Death Valley, and San Francisco. It was super tiring and hot (like hell). I also had to help my husband drive a bit. It was exhausting. But I loved it!!!
That spot in Monument Valley (Border of Utah and Arizona) where the famous scene in Forrest Gump, where he decided to stop running, was shot
Anyway, I managed to drop by an art supplies shop in San Francisco, called, Arch Art Supplies. It had some good reviews on the internet, and it was not so far away from our hotel, Grand Hyatt near Union Square, which I highly recommend! We had such a lovely time there, especially enjoying the complimentary snacks and drinks at the Lounge Club, and the beautiful view of San Francisco from there and in our own room. I especially enjoyed watching “Karl”, the fog roll in and out of the city.
So here is my video, and I hope you enjoy watching it. I’ve included in it some short clips from our trip.
Thanks for dropping by, and have a great weekend! 🙂
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. 🙂
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.
I was surprised and very flattered to be contacted by Art Tea Shop Toulouse for their Drawing Contest. They asked if they could use the photo I took of my watercolor artwork for their Drawing Contest’s flyers.
J’ai été surprise et très flattée d’être contactée par Art Tea Shop Toulouse pour leur concours de dessin. Ils m’ont demandé s’ils pouvaient utiliser pour les flyers de leur concours de dessinla photo de mon aquarelleque j’ai prise.
My original artwork and photo
If you are interested to join, do visit their instagram page for details.
Si vous êtes interessés, consultez leur instagram pour plus de détails.
This artwork was totally not my best but I guess I captured the mood really well. My composition was not bad at all. And overall, everything in the photo looks quite nice! 🙂
Cette peinture n’est pas du tout ma meilleure, mais je crois que j’ai bien saisi l’ambiance. Ma composition n’était pas mauvaise du tout. Et dans l’ensemble, tout ce qui est sur la photo est très joli 🙂
By the way, they also have a nice restaurant / tea shop, where we had one of our monthly watercolor sessions two years ago.
À propos, ils ont aussi un joli restaurant/salon de thé, où on a fait l’une de nos sessions mensuelles de l’aquarelle l y a deux ans.
Art Tea Shop in Toulouse
If you live around Toulouse, do drop by the Art Tea Shop. It’s a really nice brasserie and tea shop with warm, welcoming staff. The place is very cozy and quite original, they have good food and drinks, and they sell artworks from local artists, too. We totally had a good time there. I should go back one of these days. 🙂
Si vous habitez dans la région de Toulouse, ne manquez pas de vous rendre à l’Art Tea Shop. Il s’agit d’une brasserie et d’un salon de thé très sympathiques avec un personnel chaleureux et accueillant. L’endroit est très confortable et assez original, ils ont de la bonne nourriture et des boissons, et ils vendent des œuvres d’art d’artistes locaux, aussi. On a passé un très bon moment là-bas. Je devrais y retourner un de ces jours. 🙂
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! 🙂
Hello, hello, lovely people! How’s the first few days of 2022, so far?
As for me, I feel like celebrating since I have just finished completing and passing all the exams (five in all, including the grueling Applied Maths Subjects) due this holiday. And I still have a week to rest a bit before my classes start again!
Anyway, the last day of the year, hubs and I had a chance to go on a date and eat out at a fancy two-Michelin star restaurant called, Py-r. The first time we went there was eight years ago. It didn’t have any Michelin star yet, but it was already quite good.
And just after the sumptuous lunch, we strolled around a bit to help digest all the food we ate. We passed by one of my favorite Art Supplies Shop, Rougier et Plé. I thought I’d check out if I could really get a 10% discount from my student card. And I did! Which is really very nice! If you’d like to see my haul, do check out my Youtube video:
Happy New Year, and thanks so much for dropping by! 🙂
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.
UPDATE: I have recently added more designs on the shop:
First of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to all these people who have been buying my Christmas cards, and other gift items on the shop. I wish I could send them a personal thank you letter. I find it very touching that people from across the globe appreciate my artworks.
Thank you all, kind people for supporting my shop!
It has really inspired me to keep painting and keep doing this part-time, small hobby that gives me so much pleasure. And the pleasure is just multiplied a hundred times over when I see people appreciating my humble work. I can’t thank you enough!
And so here I was this weekend, trying to eke out a teensy weensy portion of my free time to do some painting and update my shop. I hope you like my new designs:
Pasko – Paksiw – Pasko is a tongue twister in the Philippines. Paksiw is a local dish with fish and coconut vinegar in a soup. I really miss it. It’s been more than a decade since I last had one!
Tuyo is dried fish. I’m not sure how to translate it in English but the fish is usually either Tulingan or Tawilis in the Tagalog-speaking regions. In the South, there are other varieties of fishes they use for Tuyo. Tuyo literally translates to “dry” in English. It is another one of my favorite dishes, especially for breakfast, much to the chagrin of my husband and other foreign friends who do not appreciate the smell of it. 😀
I was inspired to paint a Tropical Christmas theme because I have been terribly missing the warm tropical beaches of my home country. It’s been years since I was last in a real warm beach. This artwork was mostly done in Procreate, except for the starfishes, which were all done in watercolor.
— END OF UPDATE —
Seeing some people already starting to buy again my Filipino / Pinoy Christmas theme greeting cards online reminded me that it’s that time of the year to post them again! They are still available on my online shop: https://riosebastian.com/shop/ and on Zazzle (with 20% to 50% discount at the moment).
My Filipino theme Christmas Greeting Cards featuring prints of my original watercolor artworks
Zazzle is available in the following countries: USA, The UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc. Just don’t forget to click on the correct country in the options (you can see it on the top-right corner of the page, the globe icon).
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!
