Bottled Sky

If you have hundreds of vacation photos sitting in your hard drive and want to make better use of them, try turning them into cartoon postcards! It’s quite simple to do if you have some basic drawing and Photoshop skills.

In my aunt’s case, she had a niece with a lot of free time. Below are three of eight postcards that I made for her a few years ago (she needed them for a personal project). Click on the thumbnails for a bigger view.

I used photos from her trip to China, choosing those of her standing in front of different tourists spots with very few other people in the background. Those are the best types of photos for this kind of project.

Here’s a rundown of how you can make unique postcards out of your travel photos. One caveat: This is definitely not a tutorial. It’s more of a detailed idea for you to play around with

Continue reading Personalized Cartoon Postcards »

My college friends and I hung out at Eugene’s condo this weekend. It had been months since I last saw some of them — Tin! Nas! Albert! — so I was really excited. We went swimming, had dinner at Pancake House, played PS2 (they played; I just randomly pressed buttons), (re)watched Golden Boy, drank, slept a little, then woke up and had leftover alcohol with our breakfast. Good times. Check out the photos from Chrissa’s camera.

Of course there was gift giving, too. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I didn’t have much money to spend on gifts this year, so I did a lot of DIYing. This time I drew cartoon alter egos of the girls, had them printed, and found matching desktop frames for each drawing:

Check out my illustration portfolio for the bigger versions.

They loved it! Seeing their reactions to the cartoons got me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. The guys pretend-pouted and asked why I didn’t do the same for them, so I mock-complained about how hard they were to draw because they all looked alike, hehe. I did try, but unfortunately I can’t draw boys as well as I can girls. I got them uber-geeky squeeze flashlights instead. Maybe next year.

Happy holidays, everyone! And thanks to Rose for being extra cool

My old high school barkada (Filipino for “clique” or “group of friends”) got together for our annual holiday dinner last night. It’s been getting harder and harder to schedule our gatherings, because everyone’s so busy these days. A couple of our friends weren’t able to make it, but we still had a great time just talking and catching up on each other’s lives.

Berns, me, Jo and Fatz
Photo by Fatz. More pictures here.

As we talked about what we’d been up to the past year, what our plans were for the near future and how silly we’d all been in high school, it hit me — we’re all grown up! When did that happen?!

Continue reading Broke for the Holidays »