February 9, 2023

I’ve moved!

Well I’m keeping this site up for the time being, but in case you’ve found yourself here, I’m already at CynthiaBauzonArre.com, and my shop is now accessed thru this link. 🙂

Watercolor Workshop on Philippine Native Trees and Flowers

Breaking radio silence to invite you to my first workshop of 2019 (actually, my first workshop in almost 3 years. :D)!

Grow your appreciation for our beautiful native trees and flowers by painting them with me at our Philippine Forest Blooms Watercolor Workshop. This is a collaborative project with Forest Foundation Philippines and is still part of our ongoing Philippine native trees awareness campaign. <3

When: February 23, 2019 (Saturday)
What time: 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Where: Happy Garden Cafe, Sunshine Place, #56 Jupiter St., Bel-Air, Makati City, Metro Manila

What you’ll learn:
1 – basic color theory
2 – watercolor techniques
3 – how to paint botanical elements, with a focus on native trees and flowers

Fee: P2,000, inclusive of lunch, art materials and freebies! Open to both beginners and intermediate learners. 🙂

What exactly are the freebies? Each participant gets a premium Escoda watercolor brush + my handpicked artist grade Holbein and ShinHan paints (all from ArtWhale, squeezed in a take-home palette), fine art watercolor paper, a copy of our ForestBloomsPh Planner, Forest Blooms notebook and tote bag, and a Forest Foundation BFF Bambler!

Plus you get to be an advocate of the important role of native flowers and trees in conserving and protecting our forests. <3

Sign up here: http://bit.ly/fbphworkshop . Limited slots are available. 🙂

Drawing Philippine Native Trees for forest protection

Around the start of this year I started making notebooks and other stationery that featured local flora and fauna as a personal project. My motivation was that these are the plants I grew up around and the produce that my parents introduced to us siblings when we were young. Feeling a wave of nostalgia, I drew them while looking back at my childhood, also thinking that kids today could benefit from learning about them. (More on this here.)

I also found myself getting interested in endemic species and, through the process I learned about how a lot of our native plants and animals have, since the ’70s and ’80s, lost their habitats due to deforestation. That saddened me because it felt like this was no longer the environment I grew up in so I started drawing Philippine-endemic birds, some of them vulnerable or critically endangered – and putting them on stickers (with info sheets) and notebooks as my small way of bringing attention to them.

It was around that time when I received an e-mail from the kind folks at Forest Foundation Philippines asking if I would be open to collaborating with them. I actually had to do a double take because it was as if they had read my mind so I was on board almost immediately. <3

Some meetings, project proposals, and many brainstorming exchanges later, we thought up a campaign to promote the important role of native trees in forest protection. These greeting cards and a planner (WIP below) are among the products of our collab.

We also held a drawing contest on FB & IG (do check the #drawnativetreesph hashtag to see the entries) and there’ll be other activities soon which I won’t spoil for now. 🙂