Look closely inside some of Lee Cundañgan’s Christmas cards and you’ll spot faint smudges, the kind a print shop would wipe away before anything ships. She won’t clean them. “I refuse,” she says. To her, those marks show that a real person painted the card by hand, with paint that didn’t always go where she wanted it to.
That stubbornness runs through every card in the five-design sets she’s selling this Christmas. So does a more pressing reason for selling them this year.
Four Cards That Weren’t Supposed to Be a Business
Cundañgan calls herself an artist, storyteller, and educator, and a “professional raketera,” Filipino slang for someone who juggles several gigs at once. Painting is one of them.
Last Christmas, when she was just starting out as a painter, she made four cards for fun and didn’t think much of them. Then the compliments started coming in, a lot of them. Two close friends told her the cards deserved a proper run the following year. This year, she listened.
Five Designs, Each One Built Up by Hand
Each set has five different designs, painted by hand rather than printed. Several use modeling paste, a thick acrylic medium that adds raised texture to a flat surface, so the snow on these cards is something you can actually feel.
The Poinsettia sets the red Christmas flower against a mosaic background, a style she returns to often.
The Snowman sits idly and happily in a simple snowy landscape, wearing a mosaic-patterned scarf. Across from him stands a Christmas tree, and the lumps of snow around its roots are modeling paste, not flat paint.
The Wreath mixes regular and metallic acrylic in its leaves, so it catches the light differently depending on how you hold the card. It’s tied with a mosaic ribbon and hangs from a tree branch topped with more modeling-paste snow.
The Christmas Tree was painted with the edge bristles of a fan brush, a wide, flat brush shaped like a fan. Dabbing with it gave the tree a light pointillism, the technique of building an image out of many small dots. Modeling paste thickens the snow beneath it.
The Ornaments shows classic baubles against a mosaic background in Christmas colors.
Four of the five cards carry her mosaic work, which comes straight from the rest of her practice. Her main genres are childhood escapism and still life, and her styles move between surrealism, naive art, and cubism. The mosaic element is inspired by two Japanese ideas. Wabi-sabi is the philosophy of finding beauty in things that are imperfect and impermanent. Kintsugi is the craft of repairing broken pottery with gold, so the cracks become part of the design instead of something to hide.
Why the Imperfections Stay
Those two ideas explain the smudges. Her personal tagline is #CelebrateYOUness, and her approach is to tweak something common into something slightly different but still familiar. A Christmas tree is about as common as it gets. One with snow you can run your thumb over is a little different.
She also thinks the timing matters. With AI-generated images taking over, she believes a card painted by an actual human being carries a warmth and honesty that a generated one can’t. She describes her work as old-fashioned, imperfect, and childlike, and she thinks that’s what people need more of while technology keeps pulling everyone further apart.
“Every work was made with love,” she says. Whether it’s on canvas, a card, or a print, she wants her art to bring other people the same joy it has brought her.
The cards aren’t the only work she’s selling. There are small pieces from her Sunflower and Dessert series, which come with their own easels. There are also larger canvases, like The Morning Ritual, a split-panel piece in warm ochre, terracotta, forest green, and sunflower yellow, finished in August 2026 in the same mosaic style as the cards.
What the Sales Are Actually For
As for that more pressing reason: Cundañgan is her family’s breadwinner. Her father has passed away, and her mother, who is aging, needs ongoing medication and care for diabetes and a heart condition. Now her brother is facing an angioplasty, a procedure that reopens narrowed or blocked arteries in the heart, and the costs at home are piling up.
Having already lost her father, she’s doing everything she can to keep her mother safe and healthy. The card sets are one way she’s paying for it.
Buy a set this Christmas and you’re giving a gift someone made by hand, while helping a family with real medical bills. There are only six sets, so they won’t last long.
How to Order
- Christmas card sets: ₱899 per set of 5 hand-painted cards, all different designs, original work, not prints. Only 6 sets are available, and they’re ready now.
- Small paintings: From ₱150, with an easel included
- Original paintings: ₱2,499–₱6,000, acrylic on canvas and mixed media (acrylic paint, charcoal pencil, and modeling paste)
- Where to buy: Send a DM to @artbyleecundangan on Instagram to see the full catalog and sizes
- Shipping: Anywhere in the Philippines. Arrange the shipping fee directly with Lee when you order.
- When: Orders are open now.