A quiet morning workshop about experiencing the beauty of slowing down with the art of simple bookbinding and painting the New Mexico landscape in Fall. Learn how to make simple hand-sewn landscape journals and find all kinds of beautiful ways to fill them—with written and painted notes and observations, color studies, scribbles, collage, flowers pressings, and of course your own sights and insights. 

It’s a chance to practice presence as we take note of the world around us. 

We’ll take our time to look closely at images and elements from nature to reconsider how we see the high desert landscapes we pass each day: the largest cloud formations and the smallest butterfly and juniper berry. We’ll take color notes and record nature studies in watercolor to think about how the sun lights the sky of Northern New Mexico and learn to mix colors to evoke light, mood and weather of the high desert, dense forests and wildflowers of Northern New Mexico.

Best of all we’ll loosen our grip on what we think watercolor is supposed to be and explore intuitive ways of painting and drawing the landscape in untraditional ways to encourage you to develop your sense of play and let go of perfection. You’ll leave with a new sense of what painting with watercolor can be and a beautiful book you made yourself to inspire you going forward.

All skill levels welcome and all materials provided!

Deborah Stein lives, paints and writes in the Embudo Valley in New Mexico and sometimes in New York City. She studied the passing on of art traditions with a family of toymakers in Northern India, worked with NYC school kids as a museum educator at the Museum of Arts & Design and has traveled and taught alternative arts education workshops about seeing and translating the world in new ways for adults and children for a lifetime.

Saturday, September 20
11 am- 2pm
Class limit: 10

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