The art of papercutting & cartooning

Ever since we met Miguel Castro, sometime film actor, director and singer, he had always been in love with paper. Growing up in a family whose main occupation had been bookbinding, it was only natural that he got involved with paper and its numerous possibilities. Long before he tossed aside paper for the new obsession of becoming first a balladeer, then a classical singer, there were always the various experimentations of what he could do with paper.

Miguel put up a company that produced different kinds of paper products bearing the brand name Castro Pinoy Paper Products, even started exporting them until the market both here and abroad got saturated with such products. Naturally, they spawned copies that were sold back to back with his. Miguel made notebook covers, boxes, even masks that were shown at an art show. Eventually, Miguel gave up, concentrated on singing and founded the group The Filipino Tenors that made waves with beautiful songs and outstanding voices.

But Miguel is the type of person who obviously doesn’t give up easily. Today, he has gone back to paper and the growing papercut industry. Again, his kind of paper is not the kind from China and India that popularized the papercut business. His is from Australia and Miguel likes to say that his artwork billed CastroPapercuts is original and doesn’t use the aid of the Internet.

On the other hand, there is Rosel Hombrebueno who does what she calls the Cartooning, a combination of caricature and cartoon, and unlike Miguel, she proudly uses the Internet. Rosel is a relatively new friend whom we met during our many excursions to Liliw, Laguna, easily our favorite town for its year-round cold weather and its colorful festivals. Rosel and myself quickly felt comfortable with each other since we shared a common love for going around the country to discover places that interested us. Our latest trip with Rosel was to the Potipot Gateway Resort, a short distance from Iba, Zambales.

Rosel lives alone in a small residence in Liliw that houses her Internet café rental station on the ground floor and her living quarters on the second floor. We often wonder how she manages to run her business and at the same time, give in to her love for making lakwatsa. Recently, she gifted us with one of her Cartoons that had us with the Leaning Tower of Pisa representing our love for traveling, and a camera which as a journalist we always travel with. She also made her individual interpretations of friends Marichu Carstensen, Lodina Bandico, Gennie Dalit, Marlon “Bubu” Pedregosa and Richard Signey.

When asked how she came about doing her Cartoons, she explained, “Since I started operating my Internet café, I also began tinkering with what else I could do with it and discovered that it contained an application that could work with photographs and turn them into caricatures.”

Rosel gave them out to friends and apparently they all liked it and we told her she should continue but start charging people for it.

When Miguel was starting out with his artworks in paper, we thought that the best way people would get to know about his works was to expose them to the public. We recall booking an exhibit of masks at the Nicotina Gardens on Roxas Blvd. run by our good friend, the late Richard Tann. The public loved the masks made by Miguel and asked him what other artworks he did. That started Miguel getting exposed to the buying public. He would join painting exhibits and send some of his works until slowly his name became a familiar one to art lovers.

Similarly, we told Rosel she should stop treating her works as a hobby. Who knows what other ideas this would spawn.

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