Jasminum Sambac

Also known as the Sampaguita flower, the national flower of the Philippines. One night, after a game of flippy cup at my friend Roland's old apartment, I discovered that for some reason I had brought my sketch/rhyme book. "Exhausted from drinking", I was struck with a design-epiphany for a shirt/banner/bumper sticker/slap tag. I got to sketching, with help from friends Heathe and Frida, and came out with the following sketch:

This is what college drinking leads you to do, so drink up, kids!

At the time, I was looking to make a girl's shirt design for PFA (the Purdue Filipino Association... if you don't know, you better ask somebody!), but had already designed the unisex shirt last semester and thus this design never took off. I remembered going for something that was native to the Philippines, represented the delicateness and fragility of beauty, yet the tough survival strength as well. The Sampaguita flower is both beautiful, with such fragile petals that bloom after the humid rains, yet rise high as the vine plant from which it roots from. I knew it was a vine, white, and the flowers sprouted from bulbs, but I didn't really remember what it looked like (underage inebriation clouds the memory sometimes). Typically, in the Philippines, vendors sell Sampaguita flowers as dried, necklace-type rings to hang around your rear view mirror:

Sampaguita vendor girl... and her funky smile

But the sketch came out nice anyways, I thought. And thus finished the design as a vector, dropped shadow, and bada-bing, bada-boom:

Not bad for an after-drunken-thought, no?

And as it turns out that I was pretty close too:

Close enough... Sorta...

The moral of the story: Winning a game of flippy cup can lead to great things.

Jasminum Sambac