A brand new and special workshop with Alessandra Olanow & Betil Dagdelen

Alessandra and Betil have spent years making and breaking patterns together—learning to recognize what feels natural, staying with what doesn’t, and choosing to move forward anyway. In this four-hour workshop, they bring that process to the page.

This is not about making a “good” drawing. It’s about starting somewhere, following what emerges, and allowing the work to change you as you change it.

No experience is necessary—just a willingness to begin.

1. Start. Alessandra guides you to draw from a memory, a feeling, or a small, specific image. Rather than illustrating it literally, you’ll translate it through color, line, and mark using LDBA handmade watercolors and mixed media.

2. Find a pattern. Betil helps you step back and look closely at what you’ve made. Together, you’ll notice what’s repeating—shapes, rhythms, structures—and begin to understand the visual language that’s forming.

3. Break it. Just when things start to feel resolved, you’ll interrupt them. Add something unexpected. A mark that doesn’t belong. A layer that complicates what’s working. This is where risk enters—where both Alessandra and Betil gently push you beyond comfort and into discovery.

4. Begin again. You return to the piece with fresh eyes. The work shifts. You shift with it. This cycle—start, find, break, begin again—becomes the core rhythm of the class.

5. Share (if you want to) We close with a relaxed, informal sharing. No critique, no pressure—just the opportunity to witness what everyone has explored and created.

All materials are provided, including LDBA handmade watercolors, soft pastels, colored pencils, and a variety of papers.

Come as you are. Leave with something unexpected.

Alessandra Olanow

Writer and illustrator whose work explores loss, reinvention, and beginning again. She exclusively uses LDBA handmade watercolors and is the author of Begin Again, And Again, And Again.

Betil Dagdelen

Textile artist and designer whose woven and sculptural work explores pattern, structure, and form. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the RISD Museum.

Sunday, May 24, 2026
1-4 pm
Class limit: 8

La Petite Ecole
717 Canyon Road Unit C
Santa Fe, NM 87501