A Multi-sensory Creative Journey
April 12- April 19, 2026
Explore, Create and Awaken Your Senses Through Art, Culture, and Color
This is not a retreat you simply attend — it is an experience that settles into your body, your senses, and your inspiration. Guided by Oaxaca-raised artist Gabriela Domville and UK-based artist David Shillinglaw, you’ll explore Oaxaca as a witness, collecting fragments of daily life and translating them into your own creative language. Long after you leave, this journey continues inside your sketchbook, and inside you. Oaxaca becomes your studio.
Your sketchbook becomes your constant companion.
Nestled in the heart of Oaxaca City, Hotel Azul blends contemporary design with Oaxacan materials, colors, and textures. Spacious, light-filled rooms provide calm and inspiration. The rooftop terrace and nearby restaurants offer sweeping views of the city, perfect for sketching, sharing stories, or sipping mezcal as the sun sets. Here, your sketchbook and body map become companions for your creative journey.
Your Home Base:
Hotel Azul
DAILY CREATIVE PRACTICE
Each morning begins slowly, allowing your senses to awaken alongside the city. Through guided exercises, you’ll build and work inside a handmade sketchbook — folding, sewing, layering, pressing, and experimenting.
Alongside this, a body map practice helps you notice how colors, textures, sounds, and experiences register physically, deepening awareness and intuition.
David’s approach emphasizes exploration over outcome, intuition over perfection, and learning through observation. Your sketchbook absorbs the rhythm of Oaxaca — its light, movement, flavors, and voices — becoming a personal record of lived experience.
Immersion in Oaxaca
Oaxaca is one of the most culturally diverse regions in Mexico — a single state home to dozens of Indigenous cultures, each with its own language, traditions, and ways of understanding the world. Zapotec, Mixtec, Mazatec, Chinantec, Mixe, and many others coexist here, shaping daily life through textiles, architecture, ritual, and food. Cobblestone streets, vibrant markets, murals, colonial architecture, and cultural spaces form the backdrop of your days, while museum visits reveal how pre-Hispanic history and contemporary life continue to converse through pattern, geometry, and color.
Meals are an extension of the creative process. From countryside lunches to rooftop dinners, Oaxacan cuisine shifts from region to region — layered moles, corn in countless forms, cacao, mezcal, and local herbs — quietly influencing mark-making, palette choices, and rhythm. Shared tables create moments of presence and conversation, where culture is not observed from a distance but lived, tasted, and woven naturally into the retreat.
ARTISAN VILLAGES & ANCIENT WONDERS
Beyond the city, Oaxaca’s ancient and artisan traditions unfold. You’ll explore the Zapotec mosaics of Mitla, witness weaving in Teotitlán del Valle, and visit San Martín Tilcajete’s Alebrijes workshops.
Candle-making studios, black clay workshops, and centuries-old processes invite observation, sketching, and reflection. These moments are not about documentation — they are about translating rhythm, craft, and process into your own creative expression. Country lunches and village encounters deepen your understanding of the intimate relationship between daily life, creativity, and environment.
Meet Your Instructors
Gabriela Domville
Oaxaca-Raised Artist • Teacher • Cultural Bridge
For Gabriela, Oaxaca is memory, color, and texture. Fragments of her childhood — spinning tops, piñatas, textiles, colorful seed necklaces from the market, and murals passed down by her grandmother’s hand — weave together with architecture, doors, lintels, urban patterns, and rituals carried through generations. Deeply connected to place, artisans, and local rhythms, she invites you to collect these fragments too, guiding you to translate observation into playful, tactile expression. Throughout the retreat, color, line, and geometry become tools for seeing both the familiar and the new through layered memory, presence, and personal artistic language.
David Shillinglaw
UK Artist • Bookmaker • Muralist
For David, a sketchbook is home base — a living companion where ideas are tested, mistakes are welcomed, and curiosity leads the way. His practice centers on making books as evolving objects, spaces to think, experiment, deliberately fail, and let ideas bloom without the pressure of conclusions. Throughout the week, he’ll guide you to loosen your grip on perfection, trust your intuition, and allow your sketchbook to respond to the world around you. Each day, it becomes a vessel for capturing the energy of Oaxaca — the food, the conversations, the morning light, and the colors and textures that spark your senses. By the end of the week, you’ll leave with a full sketchbook that reflects not only what you saw, but how you experienced it.
YOUR WEEK IN OAXACA
Day 1 – Arrival & Welcome
You arrive in Oaxaca and begin to settle into its rhythm. Colors, sounds, and scents greet you before you even unpack. We gather for a welcome dinner to meet one another, share intentions, and ease into the week ahead. The sketchbook opens for the first time — not to perform, but to notice.
Day 4 – Artisan Villages & Ancient Wonders
Mitla, Teotitlán del Valle, weaving, candle-making, and El Tule.Beyond the city, artisan villages open conversations across generations. Weaving, candle-making, and ancient sites reveal how material, repetition, and ritual carry memory. Countryside flavors and open space soften the pace, feeding both reflection and mark-making.
Day 2 – Sketchbook Workshop & First Explorations
The day begins with a sketchbook workshop led by David. You explore the book as a living object — a place for risk, play, layering, and experimentation. Later, you wander through streets and markets, letting murals, textures, music, and movement guide your hand. The city begins to enter your pages.
Day 5 – Oaxaca City Immersion
Back in Oaxaca, markets and museums reveal contemporary perspectives alongside tradition. Doors, shadows, and urban geometry become quiet teachers. A rooftop dinner brings view, flavor, and conversation together, allowing inspiration to unfold naturally.
Day 7 – Reflection & Farewell
We begin the day at Monte Albán, where scale, silence, and ancient geometry invite reflection. After time to wander freely back in the city, we gather at Criollo for a closing meal and shared stories. David leads a final integration exercise, helping you recognize how your sketchbook has become a living record of the week — and a practice you carry forward.
Day 3 – Santo Domingo & Cultural Gems
We continue building your sketchbook practice with David’s guidance, adding layers, rhythm, and depth. Baroque altars, courtyards, and the geometry of Santo Domingo invite slower observation, while the Ethnobotanical Garden reveals how nature and history intertwine. Seasonal food grounds the day.
Day 6 – Alebrijes, Weaving & Black Clay Magic
Workshops in alebrijes, weaving, and black clay highlight imagination shaped by hand. Color stories and symbolic forms invite new approaches. By now, sketchbooks are layered, worn, and alive — reflecting a shared rhythm of curiosity and discovery.
Day 8 – Departure
The morning is unhurried. Over breakfast, final conversations unfold — plans exchanged, sketchbooks flipped open one last time. Hugs replace handshakes, and Oaxaca slowly releases you back into the world. You leave carrying more than memories: a way of seeing, a rhythm of attention, and a practice ready to continue wherever you land.
WHY THIS RETREAT IS DIFFERENT
This retreat invites you to live inside the act of making. Rather than aiming for perfect drawings or finished outcomes, the focus is on presence, curiosity, and process. You’ll hand-build a sketchbook that travels everywhere with you, filling it with layers of color, texture, collage, writing, pattern, and marks gathered directly from your surroundings. Mistakes are not corrected — they’re welcomed. Chaos becomes a form of language. Intuition is trusted.
Instead of observing Oaxaca from the outside, you experience it as a welcomed guest. Your sketchbook becomes a living archive of taste, movement, conversation, architecture, and emotion — a personal map of discovery you can return to long after the retreat ends.
WHO THIS RETREAT IS FOR
This retreat is for those who long to rediscover the joy of making without pressure — to sketch, play, experiment, and follow curiosity wherever it leads. It’s for people who see the world through texture, color, and pattern, and who crave inspiration rooted in real life: bustling markets, quiet courtyards, handmade objects, shared meals, and stories embedded in place.
Whether you’ve been making art for decades or are returning to a sketchbook after a long pause, this experience offers time, beauty, and permission. You’ll be supported within a warm, curious group — learning together, sharing discoveries, and witnessing each other’s creative evolution.
WHAT’S INCLUDED
• 7 nights at Hotel Azul
• All meals from welcome dinner to final breakfast
• Daily creative sessions with David
• Guided cultural and artisan experiences
• Transportation, tips, and group logistics
• Fluent Spanish guidance throughout the week
WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED
• Flights to and from Oaxaca
• Travel insurance (strongly recommended)
• Alcoholic beverages and specialty coffees
• Personal shopping or souvenirs
• Art supplies and personal materials
READY TO TRAVEL CREATIVELY?
Come ready with curiosity, an open mind, and a sense of adventure — and transform your senses into art, your experiences into a living sketchbook, and your week into a lifelong memory.
Pricing & Payment
Shared Room
$4,895 usd per person
Single Occupancy
$5,695 usd per person
Payment Schedule
Deposit: $2,500 usd due at booking (before Feb 3rd)
Final Balance: Due March 3rd, 2026
Ready to Join Us?
This retreat is intentionally small to preserve depth, presence, and creative space.
There are only 14 spots at Hotel Azul.
Once it’s booked, registration closes.
If you’ve been waiting for a sign, this is it.
Oaxaca is ready. Your sketchbook is waiting.
Curious? You’re probably not the only one.
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No. This retreat is about learning how to create and use a sketchbook as a living record of your experience. Rather than focusing on finished work, you’ll practice noticing, collecting, and responding — to place, color, texture, and feeling.
David will gently guide this process, drawing from decades of teaching, residencies, and a multidisciplinary practice rooted in observation and trust. His approach is spacious, intuitive, and accessible, meeting you exactly where you are.
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Yes. This retreat welcomes writers, photographers, musicians, designers, and anyone drawn to creative exploration. A sketchbook does not require drawing — only attention and curiosity.
You may sketch, collage, write, photograph, or gather fragments along the way. Your sketchbook becomes a personal archive of the week, shaped entirely by your own way of seeing.
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This retreat is designed for that. Abstraction, texture, color, and collage are fully supported and encouraged.
If you wish to remain within your current language, you are held there. If you feel called to gently expand into something new, guidance is available.
Gabriela works primarily through abstraction, collage and textiles, while David brings his experience across painting, drawing, and mixed media. Together, they offer complementary perspectives without prescription.
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All meals are included, from the welcome dinner through the final breakfast. You’ll experience Oaxaca’s culinary culture through thoughtfully chosen restaurants, market meals, and a private farm-to-table gathering — seamlessly woven into the retreat. Drinks and specialty coffees are not included.
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Oaxaca is best experienced on foot. Expect daily walks through cobblestone streets, gardens, and historic sites. Comfortable shoes are essential. If walking is a concern, this retreat may not be the right fit.
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The retreat begins the evening of April 12th, 2026. Arriving earlier that day — or the night before — is recommended, allowing time to settle in before the welcome gathering. We can help you secure a room at the hotel at group rate. (Subject to availability)
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Secure your place with a
Deposit Payment: $2500 usd February 3rd, 2026, which guarantees your accommodations, workshops, and curated experiences.
Final Payment: The remaining balance is due March 3rd, 2026 (40 days before the retreat begins).
For flexibility, we also offer a three-payment plan — please contact us for details.
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Your spot at the retreat is secured with your deposit, which covers accommodations, meals, and all curated experiences.
Before Final Payment (after deposit):
Cancellations must be covered by travel insurance or by finding a substitute participant to take your place.
Your deposit is non-refundable, but fully transferable to another participant.
After Final Payment (40 days before retreat):
No cancellations are accepted.
Transfers to another participant are still welcome at any time.
100% refundable if we cancel because of low enrollment
David's portraits by Joanna Dudderidge