I was approached earlier this year by the guys at Munkee Apps to design a sticker pack for InstaSize, an app that lets you fit your photos on Instagram without cropping (among other things). I’ve never heard of InstaSize up until that point, but apparently it’s a very popular app across the iOS and Android platforms and I do notice my Instagram friends using it. InstaSize not only lets you fit photos; it can collage, add labels, filters, and backgrounds to your images as well. I was using 4 or 5 other apps to do these things prior to learning about InstaSize, so it was a relief to ditch the other apps in favor of one app that can do it all.

Now InstaSize has just come out with an iOS update that includes adding sticker overlays to your photos and that’s where my involvement comes in. Remember my pet project, Pusspins? No? That’s ok, I haven’t been able to devote as much time to it as I should. Anyway, I came up with 30 stickers for a Pusspins sticker pack available for download within InstaSize.

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A closer look:

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InstaSize is available for free on the App Store. Look for InstaSize – Post Entire Photos on Instagram (developer: Munkee Apps). Once downloaded, open the app, take a photo or load an existing one from your gallery, and scroll to the right to get to the stickers.

The Pusspins sticker pack is $1.99.

Sticker interface

The stickers in action:

My cats, Tiger and Sushi

Having my illustrations be available as stickers is a dream project of mine so it’s great to have been given the chance to do just that. Thanks to the team at Munkee Apps for making it happen!

Instasize on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instasize/id576649830
Pusspins website: http://www.pusspins.com

I have four Instagram accounts.

Yes, four. One, @wedgienet, is my main account for snapshots of my illustration work, arts and crafts, and nice shots of my cats. The second one is a private, personal account for real-life friends where I post random stuff, food, not so nice pictures of my cats, and my travel photos. My third IG account is @pusspins. The fourth is a long-forgotten and abandoned account I created solely for pictures of my cat, Tiger, but I’ve since found out it takes a lot of time and effort to catapult a cat into Internet stardom (LOL).

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Between those accounts, I have over 1,700 Instagram photos, none of which I save and backup. I figure it’s “on the cloud” so after I post photos on Instagram, I delete them off my phone. I didn’t think it was a problem– not until I needed to have my photos printed.

I recently got to try printing my Instagram photos via Pixaroll. Pixaroll is a service that lets you print photos from your phone. Just download the free app, select your photos, and pay via Paypal. You’ll get your 4×4 or 4×6-inch photos (depends on the size you set) in the mail afterwards. For a lazy bum like me, I love how convenient it is to do all that even without having to stand up. Hahaha.

As I don’t have any of my original photo files on my phone, I downloaded the Instagram pictures I wanted to print off my account on Webstagram. It’s not high-res, but I thought I’d try and see if it’ll look good as a 4×4 print anyway. I uploaded my relatively low-res travel photos on the Pixaroll app on the App store (also available on Google Play and Windows 8 phone store) and received my prints in the mail from the Pixaroll HQ in Singapore seven days after.

Prints in the mail!

The prints came printed on 190gsm matte photo paper. Remember when we used to have film pictures developed and printed? No? What are you, 11 years old and too young to remember? Anyway, the paper is kind of like that– not thick, but not flimsy either. The print quality is pretty fantastic. I have a graphic design background so I’m more particular than most about things like pixels, resolution, and print quality, but considering I used non-high-res photos to print, Pixaroll passes the test. I still can tell (if I look very closely) that my printed photos were originally low-res, but the difference in quality is negligible. The average person (non-designers and non-professional photographers) probably won’t be able to tell, even.

My travel photos printed with Pixaroll
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And the colors! It amazes me that the photos turned out exactly the way they look on my phone– very vivid and saturated, as they were originally. It’s really hard to get colors to print the way they look on screen, so this impressed my inner graphic designer.

I also uploaded several of my 4R and 6R-sized Pusspins illustrations for printing– who says you need to stick to printing just photos?

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Again, Pixaroll knocks it out of the park with color matching. The images on top are my digital files. The photo at the bottom is how they came out printed: fabulous! And since I uploaded high-res files this time, I saw just how crisp and clean printing was for these graphics. On a side note, wouldn’t these Pusspins images make great greeting cards for cat lovers? 😛

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with Pixaroll. I love how they’re able to reproduce in print what you see on your screen, and I love the convenience of doing it all straight from your phone. And as an illustrator/designer, my head is just filled with lots of ideas I can use Pixaroll for, beyond just photo keepsakes: wall art, product hang tags (print strips of images in one file, cut up the strips), drink coasters (Mod Podge your images on cork board?)… I can even use these to show around a mini-portfolio of my illustrations. And the price of their prints aren’t bad– a 4R print is $0.39 USD each if you have more than 20 photos printed.

My Instagram photo of hot air balloons at the 2012 Philippine Hot Air Balloon festival

 
Check out Pixaroll’s website to learn more, and like their Facebook page to stay updated on the service!

Pixaroll: http://www.pixaroll.com
Pixaroll FAQ page: http://pixaroll.com/smile/?page_id=106
Facebook (Philippines): http://www.facebook.com/PixaRoll.PH
Facebook (general): http://www.facebook.com/PixaRoll
Pusspins: http://www.pusspins.com

[ Full disclosure: I am part of Pixaroll’s Star-Rollers (“a community made up of our customers that love to share their PixaRoll experiences through their crafts”) and received fifteen free prints from Pixaroll to try them out. I ordered five more prints I paid for myself. This is an unbiased review of their service, which I am happy with and see myself using again and again 🙂 ]

Note: This post was going to be a Sunday Snippets entry which should explain the randomness at the start. I didn’t get to post it then because my hosting provider was down at the time.

I went to the dentist last Saturday. Sad face. I hate, hate, HAAAAATE going to the dentist, even if it’s just for a routine cleaning. Going to the dentist is one of my biggest non-mortal fears, and while my current dentist is nice, I cannot fathom why there are people who choose to become dentists. It’s a horrible profession! …said the girl with a lot of cavities in her teeth.

I had a molar pulled. This happened:

I am not exaggerating.

Please do not judge my illustration skills by this crude doodle alone. I just wanted to show you what happened— in order to pull my big, fat molar out, the dentist had to use both hands to pull and the dentist’s wife had to hold my head down. And it didn’t come out easy. It took them maybe five minutes to pull my tooth out (I was on anaesthesia so I didn’t feel any pain, just discomfort and pressure on my mouth), and when it did, one of the tooth’s “legs” (I know there’s a proper term for it but whatever!) broke off and was left in the gum. Ah, well…

After my time at the dentist, I went to the supermarket to buy painkillers and antibiotics and also to pick up a copy of the July 13th issue of The Philippine Daily Inquirer. Earlier that week, I was contacted by the Inquirer and was asked if they could do a feature on my Instagram account for the Super section. I said yes, of course, despite the fact that I had to take a selfie (the horror!) for the article. I thought I was going to be there along with a few other featured Instagram users, so imagine my surprise when I picked up my copy and saw this:

Turns out it’s the start of a weekly column where they feature one of their favorite Instagrammers and I was the first to be featured. Aww, yay! They printed some of their favorite photos from my feed and my answers to their questions. You can check out the online version (not all photos available) of the article here. Thanks to Pam Pastor for the feature! 😀

This is timely because at the time of writing, I’m just a few followers shy of 2,000 (the article on Inquirer brought in around 35~ new followers the day it was published). That blows my mind sometimes, considering that when I first joined Instagram a year and a half ago, I had 86 followers and most of them were friends and acquaintances. I wanted at least 500 followers then and had no idea how to get to that number. I kept posting anyway, simply because IG was fun in itself, followers or no followers.

Some of what I post on IG

In time, I started gaining followers, especially after I streamlined my feed about a year ago to exclude everything else that didn’t fall into one of these categories: drawings, illustrations, my work, arts and crafts, cute stuff, my cats. I had to make a second, private, personal, for-real-life-friends-and-Facebook-pseudo-friends-only IG account for all other things I wanted to post but didn’t fit in with those things above.

Instagram is a great community and I’ve also found some new favorite artists, photographers, and online friends there. This is your cue to follow me on Instagram— my username is @wedgienet. I’m aiming for 3,000 followers by the end of the year 😛 #ambisyosa XD

Flying over Manila, Philippines. Photo from my Instagram.

 
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been traveling these days. I’ve been in California since the first week of April for a little working vacation to visit family and friends and go on little trips on the side.

From Manila, I flew two hours to Taiwan where I spent some time during my four-hour layover looking for the Hello Kitty airport lounge (more on that in another entry). Then from Taipei, I took a 12-hour flight to Los Angeles. I was hoping to catch an in-flight movie but the man sitting in front of me on the plane had inconsiderately reclined his seat all the way back and I couldn’t see the screen in front of me properly. Oh, the hassle of flying economy. I slept a lot instead (what else is there to do?) and worked on this page.

I really regret not bringing a book along. I didn’t want to add bulk to my already-overstuffed luggage.

by the Embarcadero. Photo from my Instagram.

 
I spent a nice-but-too-short weekend in San Francisco a few days ago and it was so short that I didn’t even make a dent in my travel journal, but I found enough idle time for a few pages of drawings while waiting for the Amtrak from LA to San Diego after my SF weekend.

You can click here for a bigger version of this page.

The girl from the tropical country wears too many layers for LA.

 
I’m chilling for the next few weeks here in San Diego and hopefully I can sneak in more drawings in my journal. I’ve not finished my journal entries from my Japan trip yet!

No weekend plans? No problem! Plenty of ways to pass the time with weekend projects! Some sneak peeks:

Saturday stay-in!

Cool cats. Planning to do tons of these for a promo piece.

Sad panda with a mustache. Um, what?

Catching up on my travel journal backlog (again… more on that in a future blog post… when I finish the journal).

Photos are from my Instagram account (@wedgienet).

Hope you had a good weekend! My Facebook page, by the way, recently hit 200+ likes (thank you!). Get in on that for occasional, non-spammy, and non-annoying updates: http://facebook.com/wedgienet.net 🙂

I lost my phone just before the holidays. Let’s not get into how I lost it, but it involved stupidity. I wasn’t too bummed though. If anything, I was slightly relieved– I hated my old phone as it was hard to use and counter-intuitive. Losing my phone was an excuse to get a new one! :3

I went phone-less for a while because I couldn’t be bothered to get a new one in the middle of all the Christmas holidaze. So for two weeks I walked around, unwired from the world and without a care, as if I put everyone/everything else on the backburner. What a great feeling!

I can’t be phone-less forever though, so eventually I walked into my phone service provider’s store and waited for over three hours to get myself………. an Instagram account 😉 Hahahaha!

Colored pencils from Muji

At the Greenbelt 3 cinemas

A spread from my travel sketchbook (more on that in a future blog post)

The novelty has not worn off yet. I’m really enjoying the prettiness other people upload on the app. Here are more of my other if-this-photo-did-not-have-a-filter-applied-to-it-it-would-look-like-crap snaps I’ve taken so far (no latte foam art and sunsets… YET):

01: walking around in Greenbelt 3, 02: mess on my desk part 1, 03: mess on my desk part 2, 04: candy jar

Are you on Instagram? Follow my artsy-fartsy-bordering-on-pretentious (haha!) feed there. My username is @wedgienet 🙂