Learn how to make, paint, and eat a nostalgic Filipino dessert!
Our crowd favourite Halo Halo Watercolour Workshop is back at Magenta House on Saturday 11 April 2026 featuring Gizelle Faye on the brush and Mariam Ella Arcilla on the spoon!
Halo-Halo is a nostalgic Filipino dessert that translates to ‘mix-mix’ in Tagalog. The beauty of halo halo is that there’s no single way to make it - which makes it a creative dessert! In this class, you get to build your own halo halo according to your taste and dietary preferences. Choose from a colourful smorgasbord prepared by Mariam featuring jellies, fruits, beans, ice cream, shaved ice, and other delectable home-made and artisan toppings. Gizelle will teach you how to paint the edible anatomy of your halo halo using vibrant watercolours and creative techniques. Learn how to mix tones and add textural depth to your painting.
What you'll receive at the workshop:
🎨 All-you-can-eat Halo Halo
🎨 Watercolour kit with Holbien paints
🎨 Paintbrushes in a pencil-case container
🎨 Clipboard with watercolour paper
🎨 Watercolour basics manual
🎨 Glass jar for you to paint watercolours at home
Halo-Halo ingredients (updated April 2026)
🍨 Ube Cookies & Cream Ice Cream
🍨 Cheesecake & berries Ice Cream
🍨 Vanilla & makrut zest ice cream (plant-based)
🍨 Purple Kaong Sugar Palm Fruit
🍨 Red Kaong Sugar Palm Fruit
🍨 Green Kaong Sugar Palm Fruit
🍨 Tapioca Pearls (Multi-colour)
🍨 Coconut cubes
🍨 Strawberries
🍨 Sweetened corn
🍨 Ube Halaya Jam
🍨 Sweetened Saba Bananas
🍨 Ripened Bananas
🍨 Red jackfruit
🍨 Passionfruit jam
🍨 Red mung beans
🍨 Dragonfruit
🍨 Coconut Nata De Coco
🍨 Red Kidney Beans
🍨 Coffee jelly
🍨 Condensed milk
🍨 Coconut milk
🍨 Pinipig toasted rice
🍨 Pineapple cake-slices
🍨 Chocolate wafer sticks
🍨 Butterfly pea crushed ice
🍁 Spots are limited due to the intimate and gentle-paced nature of this session.
🍁 Workshop fees go towards painting utensils, food ingredients, program prep, and partial labour (gurls gotta’ eat!)
🍁 Ingredients may vary closer to the day depending in availability and seasonality. Vegan and gluten-free ingredients offered. Pls contact Mariam on housekeeper@magentahouse.com.au for dietary and access queries.
Team
Halo-halo maker / Event Organiser/Comms: Mariam Ella Arcilla
Watercolour teacher / Event Organiser: Gizelle Faye
Bios 🐣
Gizelle Faye is an artist, florist, stylist, calligrapher, letterer, mum and wife to Harry. She is a kindred spirit, a risk-taker and a perfectionist who ironically thrives in beautiful chaos. Her undying love for books, fascination with art & pop culture and obsession with music allows her to escape from reality and pool inspiration for her art style. She has long believed there’s more to life than a cubicle in an office so she went Cuckoo and left her corporate job to pursue her dreams in 2012 and founded Cuckoo Cuckoo Concepts. For a decade, she was the creative director of the event styling and floral design company, dreaming up unforgettable and picture-perfect moments from a tropical island called Cebu. It was during the pandemic that Gizelle picked up her paints and brushes and rediscovered her love for painting amidst the dark times. The universe proved a lot more cuckoo than her and sent her & her family on a journey that will find them in Camden, NSW. But Gizelle vows to always bloom where she is planted so today, in this new country, she continues to paint, hosts art workshops and creative experiences, and offers social media content styling and creation, and other creative services for small businesses. Instagram
Mariam Ella Arcilla is a Filipina-Singaporean creative who works across producing, arts admin, writing, marketing, and community-building. She runs Magenta House, which supports emerging artists, experimental practices, and equitable arts ecologies. Mariam has managed artist-run initiatives, social justice projects, galleries, and indie publications since 2006. For Mariam, the meaning of tahanan (home) is a reworlding and co-nurturing exercise. She grew up in a household of artists and chefs in Quezon City and spent her childhood selling snacks, making zines, and turning waste into recycled art. She was raised by her headstrong creatrix Lola (grandmother), who passed on life disciplines to help Mariam spiritually self-anchor during a time of family separation and turbulence, which saw her ping-pong through foster homes for a decade before immigrating to Australia at 16. All this time, Mariam remained hopeful that she'd one day find her way back to her Lola’s kitchen–the place she felt most safe. As an adult, she eventually returned to the Philippines to reunite with her family, savouring her Lola's final years on this Earth. Today, Mariam lives on Gadigal Country and maintains a multimodal practice that translates knowledge-relay, communal feeding and domestic hospitality into creative acts of service. Mariam strives to carry her Lola's legacy by making Magenta House an artistic safehouse for kindreds to congregate, learn, rest, nurture and seed together. Instagram
1pm – 4pm
