I’ll give you fair warning that my posts will be all over the place for a few weeks.  We’ll be bouncing around between Christmas decorating, gifting, and crafting, to early October in Italy, and then whatever else I’m working on.  Welcome to my life.  Today, we’re back in Tuscany at the La Dolce Vita Retreat.  While this trip was a vacation, it was also work.  I was here to teach a creative workshop for the retreat attendees.  I wanted my workshop to focus on art while staying approachable for those who don’t consider themselves artists.  I decided to teach on keeping a travel journal that went beyond sitting and sketching what you see.  While that can be a part of keeping a travel journal, I think that’s the piece that is intimidating to most people.  I am an artist, and it intimidates me!  I’m not as at home with paper and pencil as I am with paint.  So, in preparation for the workshop, I started experimenting with ways to capture a space that didn’t involve traditional sketching.

I haven’t shown you around the place where we stayed, yet, but here are a few pictures so you have an idea of the setting.  The place where we stayed is called a podere.  It’s a rural estate with multiple outbuildings and extensive grounds.  This is the main villa where the dining room and workshop spaces were located, and where most of the retreat guests stayed.  My mom and I stayed in one of the owners’ guest rooms in their private house, which had once housed the laborers and stables.  I believe some of the buildings date back to the 15th century, but my recollection is a little fuzzy on that.  The property also includes over 600 olive trees, which are used to produce olive oil.  Needless to say, there was a lot of beauty around, so we could take lots of “field trips” during our workshop.

This is the podere’s chapel (with a confessional and everything.)

Our room was above the archway and to the left.

The workshop space was gorgeous with lots of light, white walls, and exposed stone.

We got things set up in the morning after breakfast.  Each participant had a paper palette with a limited watercolor palette, brushes, glue, a waterproof ink pen, a pencil, and the interior of a sketchbook we would bind in another workshop later in the week.

I started the workshop with some encouragement – we weren’t making a sketchbook that was a finished work.  We were recording our experience, playing, and experimenting.  There wasn’t a way to mess this up.

(Photos without my watermark are by the retreat photographer, the talented Paige Knudsen.)

As a warm-up, we started with color mixing so everyone could get to know the limited palette and see all the colors they could make.

One thing I love about creative work is that we all work with the same materials and colors, yet the color swatches are different.  Some mixed brighter colors, others more muted.  Some were highly pigmented, while others were watered down and faint.  Some painted circles, others stripes or squares.  It is a delight for me to see how each person made different creative choices intuitively.

Here are my swatches and color wheels…

I made the color wheels to show the difference between using Yellow Ochre and Cadmium Yellow.

Some of you may be surprised to know that my mom is not at home in an art workshop.  She is creative and artistic in many ways, but she is not one to sit down to sketch and paint.  Well, unless it was helping me paint furniture.  But she worked diligently on her color mixing, and as I walked around to check each table, her paper towels, used to blot the brushes, caught my eye.  “I think that’s my favorite thing you’ve ever made, Mom!”  She inadvertently created striking abstract art!

The whole point of color mixing was the learn the palette so we could go outside and capture the colors of the place.  Instead of making sketches, we were going to mix and label the colors that spoke to us – the terracotta pots, the dusty green olive leaves, the rich evergreens, the blue shutters.

The color work took most of the morning, so after our lunch break, we worked on sketching.  We weren’t doing traditional sketches, but simplifying what we saw with blind contours, line drawings, and value studies.

I think this was my favorite part, watching each woman, sketchbook in hand, drawing something that caught their eye.  Sketching is much less about what’s happening between pencil and paper and more about what’s happening between your eye and the subject.  It’s about observation and solidifying a memory.

Here are a couple of my sketching exercises…

After doing a few sketching exercises, we gathered leaves, herbs, and flowers to label and press in our books.

This was followed by free creative play time to use a combination of everything we learned to fill a few more pages.  One of the ladies purchased some antique letters, receipts, and documents at the Arezzo antique market and generously shared them with the group.

So, we clipped and glued things down.  We sketched and painted, and played.  It was such a wonderful time, and as the teacher, I was thrilled by how each student, regardless of their experience and comfort level with art, embraced the work.

I know, for me, it was a highlight.  It was a day spent noticing, sharing, learning, and discovering.