Tops ArtFest 2026 Plein-Air Painting Competition: ₱50,000 Top Prize, 26 Hours, No Registration Fee
Tops ArtFest 2026’s plein-air painting competition runs Oct 23-24 at TOPS, Cebu: ₱50,000 top prize, no registration fee, and 26 hours to paint.
Tops ArtFest 2026’s plein-air painting competition runs Oct 23-24 at TOPS, Cebu: ₱50,000 top prize, no registration fee, and 26 hours to paint.
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 …