TRAVELLING ART COURSES
In the last 30 years, I have taught people of all ages all over the globe: women in rural India, street children in Rwanda, village communities in Brazil, and children in state care in Hungary. It taught me that being in a community, having a sense of belonging, and experiencing authentic self-expression are strong foundations of our well-being, regardless of age or situation. I learned that we all carry stories that we would like to tell.
Teaching, for me, is to hold a space where people can connect to their artist self, and meet the potential of their creativity. This is the fundamental purpose of my courses/workshops: to provide a safe container and invite people - through a certain technique or method - to explore their “language” of artistic expression.
Although making art is an individual and quite solitary process, there is a huge power in people sharing this journey with each other. I believe in shared human presence in a physical space. I also love connecting with and getting to know people, and also travelling and exploring. So, while they can be also offered in an online version, I gladly bring my workshops/courses to you in person.
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Making art is an innate part of us, and it plays a huge role in our well-being, finding balance, self-confidence, and a sense of belonging.
Art is about connection - to self, and to others. Through art we are invited to encounter ourselves as an inseparable part of the living world.
The aim of my courses is to experience this innate potential and how it can enrich our lives.
My courses are about finding our authentic self-expression through brave and bold artistic play and experimentation with tools, materials, and modalities. I primarily use the methodology of illustration, as it is an extraordinary means to express emotions and tell stories.
We dive to access our inner images, and learn a visual language to tell our own stories. Courses are a safe space to discover and experiment with this new language, until we find our own unique ways of expression.
Building blocks of this “language” are sketching, illustration techniques, storytelling, and picture book making.
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ADULTS - Meeting our inner artist, connecting to our creative self, finding our way of self-expression, telling our stories through illustration. On any level of art, at any stage of their individual artistic journey.
FAMILIES / PARENT-CHILD - co-creation and bonding through art. Capturing family stories and memories through art, and dwelling at some important moments of the ever-passing time.
TEACHERS - easy-to-use, playful art methods in the classroom, connected to specific subjects, themes, epochs.
YOUNG PEOPLE - work with chosen themes through art.
CHILDREN / SCHOOL GROUPS - move from head to heart and hand through playful and expressive art techniques. Workshops can be connected to any school subject, creating a deeper and more personal connection to it
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Each course can be customized in length and depth, content and focus, according to the needs of the audience.
I can deliver a course standing on its own, or I can weave art sessions into your program/retreat as required.
I can also bring a small exhibition of my work along in a format that suits your space.
Ready to collaborate on a workshop?
Choose from my offerings below (or see the 2025 PDF), find a venue and date, gather participants, and contact me. We'll discuss the details and customize the workshop to your needs. I'll then come and lead the session! Looking forward to hearing from you!
WORKSHOPS
WORKSHOPS are about learning a new art technique, experimenting with a new way of artistic expression.
Workshops can also delve into specific themes, such as identity, shadow work, nature connection, climate emotions, and family memories, or connect to school subjects like geometry, biology, and literature (see individual workshop descriptions for recommendations).
LENGTH AND DEPTH: Adults: A 3.5-hour session is a good starting point. Workshops can be structured in 1-3 sessions (e.g., consecutive evenings or within a single day). Multiple sessions allow for deeper exploration of techniques and themes. Three sessions are ideal for fully exploring any listed theme. Children: Sessions are typically 2x45 minutes (ages 6-12) or 3x45 minutes (ages 12+).
PICTURE BOOK ILLUSTRATION:
Noah’s Ark
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A workshop about the making of a picture book. How do we tell a story through words and images?
Where do stories and images come from? How to go about writing a story, and illustrating it?With adults we work around exploring and developing our own visual language, creative writing, illustration exercises, storyboard. (In depth, please see among Courses.)
This is a very successful workshop in school classes. We discuss questions like how an illustrator works, how a story is born, how printing works?
In the second part of the workshop we try cyanotype, the technique the book was illustrated with. Each person creates her/his own cyanotype illustration. (Sunshine required.)
A version with ecological focus: ‘What would you bring to the Ark with you?’
A workshop around our feelings related to climate emergency. Following Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects we create our Ark together. Possible both with children and adults - in a different depth. -
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ILLUSTRATION IN A BOX:
Stories around us
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If we walk on a street, wait for the bus, or queue in a shop, and listen carefully, we will realize, stories are all around us. The same is true for our own life - just listen to your Grandma, or open an album of family photos… Or simply observe your family for half an hour…
We will practice being anthropologists and explorers, and collect stories. Then we turn them into 3D illustrations, using cereal boxes, ink, paint, scissors, tiny stamps. It’s fun! -
THE WALKING ARTIST: Sketching foundations
CYANOTYPE:
Play in blue with nature
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Cyanotype is an archaic photographic method which uses sunshine, and is always blue. It is connected to the name of Anna Atkins, a botanist in the 1800’s.
I love this method as it teaches a deep connection with nature. We explore and collect natural shapes, and play with the sun to create photograms. Then we further develop these to create illustrations.
The method is also perfect to work with the theme of light and shadow. I illustrated Peter Pan with this method, and later Noah’s Ark. -
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STENCIL:
Printing on textile
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And your pillow case, kitchen towel, table cloth, or curtain… Anything.
Stenciling is a textile printing technique which allows for a personal and unique look, while the result also looks absolutely professional. This is the technique you can never get bored of, it has so much variety.
We design and cut our own stencils, and apply them on the textiles we want. Works on the wall, or any other flat surfaces as well… -
PRINTMAKING / STAMPING:
Symbols and Patterns
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Printmaking is one of the most playful and enjoyable art methods. Printmaking helps us to simplify, and has a very characteristic language. Stamping allows for repetition and mirroring, which creates exciting possibilities for “construction” in our images.
Different methods can be tried: linocut, monotype, tetrapak intaglio, rubber carving, rubber foam cutting.
For adults, or children 11yrs up. -
DARK AND LIGHT:
The ancient art of shadow storytelling
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This workshop is real magic, but it needs a bit more time. Our mind has to get familiar with the language of shiluettes, and our hands have to get skilled in cutting our shapes from paper. But the result is worth everything!
We work with stories, create our illustrations using cut-out shapes, objects, nature items. Then we play with colour and light… Very difficult to stop! :) -
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In this workshop we learn the basics of sketching. How do we capture what we see in a sketchbook, while out and about?
Exercises of composition, perspective, and the use of pencil, ink, watercolour. We will go from simple to complex views, draw buildings, trees and humans. -
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ART BOOKS / BOOKBINDING
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Arrotolato books, three-dimensional books, book sculptures… Books with japanese, coptic, buttonhole binding… and so much more.
Bookmaking carries endless possibilities. In this workshop we experiment with how form enables storytelling, and how the word “book” can gain new dimensions. -
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COURSES, RETREATS
PICTURE BOOK ILLUSTRATION
Telling your story
Telling a story is an ancient way of communication. We make sense of the world and our lives through stories. Each of us carry stories within - either stories we heard, stories we lived, or stories wanting to born from us.
Illustration is a powerful way of telling a story, through its capacity of expressing emotions, and reaching into the heart, but also through its metaphoric use of visual language. In a picture book, or illustrated book, text and image tell a story together, in a delicate interplay with each other. It is an amazing art, and there are amazing illustrators out there creating unbelievable magic.
In this course we will dive in for our own stories, and get in touch with our inner imagery. Through gentle and playful exercises we set out to explore this inner landscape, and bring what we find, onto paper. The process is built of visualisations, creative writing, experiments of finding our own voice, developing visual vocabulary, illustration exercises, taking inspiration from illustrators and picture books, storyboarding, character development, and artist mindset work. We will work both on improving drawing/painting skills, on developing authentic expression, and learn the steps of creating an illustrated story.
By the end of the course we can arrive to a story / a concept of a picture book / a storyboard, and a few illustrations. We will have several sketches, and a number of techniques tried, so we can take it all home with us and continue the work.
This is a wide curriculum, so what fits into a course is very much time dependent. Good to have at least 3 half days, but ideally this is a 4-5 full day course. It can be a course of seasonal units, running through a year.
THE WALKING ARTIST
Art explorations on-the-go
In this course we get acquainted with how to make art while out and about. Whether we are sitting in a café, going on a journey, or walking a pilgrim route, we are continuously reached by impulses we would like to capture.
Artists are explorers - says Keri Smith, and she is right: artists are anthropologists, and for an anthropologist, everything is interesting, from the spectacular to the seemingly most mundane.
This course is built on 3 main stones:
1: Sketching/illustration techniques easily adaptable on-the-go, but at the same time very playful and experiential. I am an illustrator, I tend to like techniques which are illustrative/exploratory rather than realistic. We will work with ink and watercolour, printmaking, cyanotype, collage, with an emphasis on interaction with our natural or urban environment, searching for ways to incorporate what we collect or find around us.
2: Ways of observation: how can we as artists be present with a heightened sensitivity to notice, to explore, to awe, to step into conversation with our environment? How can we notice the stories that are all around us? Many-many playful and out-of-the-box way of capturing these observations into our sketchbooks.
3: Walking as an art and mindfulness practice. How can walking and art lead us on an inner journey? Gentle exercises to deepen into connection with the place where we are, and journaling about it through words and images.
This curriculum can be tried in a few-hour-long sketch-walk, or during a longer stretch of walking. A nice combination is studio work (learning techniques), and taking walks (observation exercises, inner journey). If you are leading people on a pilgrimage, I can join you and facilitate the artistic process.
IN CO-CREATION WITH NATURE
Compassionate dialogue through art with the more-than-human world
Many of us are deeply concerned about the state of our planet, and may also sense how deeply it is connected to the state of our mind, body and soul.
As M. Amos Clifford, forest bathing guide puts it: “Humans are not separate from nature and have no free pass to escape the effects of the traumas we inflict upon it. Healing of people and forests happens together, or not at all. The medicine that brings healing is in the relationship.”
(Quote from Emma Burleigh: Earth Color)
Our artistic explorations in this course will focus on how, through this connection, can we meet and be with our emotions related to the above, and experience our one-ness with the living world around us. We will experiment with methods to deepen into connection with nature and ourselves at the same time, and let it be expressed through art. We will build on the concept of “nature connectedness”, researched at the University of Derby (GB), identifying 5 pillars: Senses, Emotion, Beauty, Meaning and Compassion. And we will also draw from The Work that Reconnects by Joanna Macy.
These exercises are not focusing on product, rather process. As Emma Burleigh beautifully puts it: “Think of your works of art as appreciations, poems, or even prayers that you are creating from nature and offering back to nature”. Still, it can result in surprisingly rich and deep artistic outcomes.
DREAMING OUR STORIES
The Room of Imagination
Art, as well as dreams, speaks in the language of metaphors and symbols. Our “originality” and truth of artistic expression lies in getting in touch with our own inner imagery, and develop our personal visual vocabulary of this mythic language.
As Toko-pa Turner, Canadian author and dreamworker says: “Imagination is not a thing. It is not a muscle we have to strengthen or a part of the brain that we need to unlock. It is not something bestowed on a chosen few “gifted” creatives. It is a PLACE where something begins, where something arises. Inherent to us all, imagination is a place, a reality —quite unlike this one — where visionaries have always travelled to harvest new images and ideas from this sacred ground to guide, propel, and inspire."
In this course we are gently reaching out to this “place” within us, and invite our inner imagery to surface. We will play with light and shadow, use intuitive painting techniques, and Jungian art methods to dive into the well, and then place these fragile images on paper.
This happens on the level of gentle playfulness, inspired by the works of Marion Woodman, Toko-Pa Turner, and my experiences of Vision Quests with David Wendll-Berry.
FAMILY STORIES AND MEMORIES
Workshops for parents, and parent-child co-creation
Workshops for parents offer space to be in full presence with yourself and create. We focus on our common experience called "family". Our experiences of and relationship to parenting, or to our parents and upbringing, is so rich and complex that it is hardly possible to comprehend. These stories are woven into who we are, and we are woven into them. They are the most difficult, and the most precious.
In the focus of these workshops are our family memories and stories, from our past and in our present: stories we inherit, and stories we continuously create. We reflect upon, share, and turn them into art. This can be a personalised album of family memories, playful illustrations or collages using family photos, or a very popular method is the "box illustration" (see in Workshops).
In these workshops there are no young children, this is dedicated me-time for mothers, fathers, couples, siblings, or parent-grandparent "teams".
Family co-creation workshops are recommended for children age 10 and up, coming together with parent(s). These workshops are about recalling our family memories and creating art together, following simple and playful methods. The emphasis is on co-creation, bonding in the creative process, while, as parents, we have the rare opportunity to meet and admire our child's unique point of views, her/his ideas and approach to creation.
With young children (6-10) it is shorter and intense. With older children (11 up) it can be longer, deeper immersed.
ART-PLAY IN THE CLASSROOM
Easy-to-use art/illustration techniques for educators
This workshop is for teachers, to play, experiment and learn a range of art methods that can be used in the classroom.
These are art techniques that do not require too many tools and materials, but are still unusual and interesting for students. They are easy and offer the feeling of accomplishment, while leaving a lot of room for creativity and individual artistic expression.
The aim is to deepen a learning process through artistic expression, and involve the hand and the heart into any subject, such as history, literature, botanical studies, biology, geometry, etc.
Some examples: renaissance portraits with printmaking / botanical photography with cyanotype / geometry with stamping. But any topic or subject can be “translated” into an artistic process. I develop a workshop through discussion with the teachers, refining it to age group, circumstances, timeframe.
It is fun, very enjoyable, and messy!
Let’s work together!
Interested in inviting me to teach a course or workshop? Fill out some info and I will be in touch shortly! Can't wait to hear from you!
