Workshop
A Week of Art, Exploration & Handmade Books
with David Shillinglaw & Gabriela Domville
Seven days of guided sketching, cultural discovery, and creative renewal in Oaxaca.
This isn't your typical workshop.
It’s an all-inclusive creative retreat where you’ll explore Oaxaca through sketching, color, texture, book-making, and deep artistic play. You’ll wander ancient sites with your sketchbook, gather inspiration from vibrant markets, experiment with handmade materials, and build your own artist book — all while staying in a boutique hotel in one of Mexico’s most inspiring cultural capitals.
Led by internationally recognized artist David Shillinglaw and local artist Gabriela Domville, you’ll spend a transformative week collecting ideas, observing your surroundings, and diving into hands-on creative sessions designed to reconnect you with your artistic voice. Together, your hosts will guide you through sketchbook experimentation, mixed-media explorations, visual journaling, and the meditative craft of making a book from scratch.
Seven days. All meals included. Guided tours. Studio sessions. Sketchbook walks. Creative workshops. Everything taken care of so you can focus on what matters: rediscovering your curiosity, your joy, and the creative spark that brought you to art in the first place.
The Experience
Oaxaca has a way of slowing you down so you can truly see again. It invites you to wander at a gentler pace past cobblestone streets lined with bold, painted doors, through courtyards where bougainvillea cascades over stone, and into moments that ask to be sketched, savored, and remembered.
Each day blends cultural immersion with creative exploration, grounding your experience in both place and practice.
Some mornings, we’ll head out as a group climbing the pyramids of Monte Albán with our sketchbooks in hand, tracing colors through the bustling markets, or visiting artisan workshops where alebrijes and other traditional crafts come to life. These moments become the raw material for your pages: textures, gestures, stories, and the sensory atmosphere that defines Oaxaca.
Other days, we’ll stay closer to the city sketching inside the serene cloisters of Santo Domingo, absorbing the palettes and patterns of the Botanical Garden, lingering over a long lunch in a shaded courtyard, or letting the rhythm of the day guide what shows up in your handmade book.
Throughout the week, your sketchbook becomes an extension of your senses recording not just what you see, but what you taste, hear, feel, and discover. By the end, it will be alive with impressions: stains from market fruits, pressed flowers, color washes inspired by morning light, and quick drawings made between conversations. A living archive of your days in Oaxaca.
Meals are very much part of the adventure, too.
We’ll share everything from elegant dinners at world-class restaurants to relaxed, open-air lunches at a farm-to-table experience. Every meal is chosen to immerse you in Oaxaca’s culinary traditions rich moles, handmade tortillas, seasonal ingredients, and flavors shaped by deep history.
This retreat is designed so you can savor Oaxaca with all your senses — and return home with your sketchbook full, your creativity reset, and your spirit recharged.
Where You'll Stay:
Hotel Azul
Our home base for the week is Hotel Azul, a boutique hotel in the heart of Oaxaca where art and comfort meet.\
Every room is its own little gallery — furnished with contemporary design, tiled bathrooms created by renowned Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo, and original artwork by Maestro Zárate.
It’s the kind of place where every detail has been thought through: soft robes and slippers waiting after a long day, a courtyard filled with light, and a rooftop bar for an evening cocktail.
From Hotel Azul, everything you want is basically around the corner. We’ll be walking to most of our destinations — which means you’ll log plenty of steps without even noticing, because the streets here are half the fun.
Just remember to bring shoes you can actually live in, not the cute ones that shred your feet after two blocks.
A Glimpse of Our Week
Tuesday, March 3 — Arrive in Oaxaca
Welcome to Oaxaca!
You’ll check into Hotel Azul, drop your bags, rinse off the travel, and take a moment to breathe in the warm air of the city.
In the evening, we’ll gather — David, Gabriela, and your fellow creative travelers — for a welcome dinner.
No sketchbooks yet, no pressure. Just good food, easy conversation, and that feeling of yes… these are my people.
Wednesday, March 4 — Santo Domingo & the Botanical Garden
We’ll begin with breakfast at the hotel, followed by a gentle intention-setting and sketchbook warm-up with David.
Then we’re off to Santo Domingo, sketching in the cloisters as morning light spills across stone and shadow.
Afterward, we’ll wander through Oaxaca’s iconic Botanical Garden, gathering shapes, textures, silhouettes, and color inspiration — perfect material for the first layers of your handmade book.
Thursday, March 5 — Mitla & the Tule Tree
After breakfast and a creative prompt for the day, we’ll head to Mitla to study the ancient Zapotec geometric mosaics — patterns you’ll want to trace, repeat, distort, or reinvent in your sketchbook.
Then we’ll visit the legendary Tule Tree, more than 2,000 years old. Its bark alone holds enough texture for a dozen pages. Feel free to make rubbings, color studies, or intuitive marks inspired by its massive presence.
Friday, March 6 — Markets, Kitchens & Color Stories
First stop: the market, bursting with chiles, flowers, herbs, and fruit that beg to be sketched and tasted.
Then we head into an immersive Oaxacan cooking class, rolling tortillas, stirring moles, and cooking the kind of lunch you’ll dream about later.
Afterward, we’ll stroll through Xalatlaco’s mural-lined streets, taking in color, pattern, and texture.
Back at the hotel, you’ll have a siesta before gathering for an afternoon creative session with Gabriela, turning the day’s flavors and colors into mixed-media pages.
Saturday, March 7 — San Agustín Etla & Private Farm Lunch
We’ll travel to San Agustín Etla, a former textile mill turned contemporary art center. The architecture alone is inspiration — weathered stone, industrial beams, lush landscape.
Later, we’ll slow the pace with a private farm lunch: long tables under open sky, ingredients harvested that morning, sketchbooks open beside your plate. Plenty of time to rest, draw, absorb, and enjoy.
Sunday, March 8 — Monte Albán & Criollo Brunch
We’ll spend the morning climbing the sacred ruins of Monte Albán, sketching glyphs, stones, vistas, and the quiet immensity of the site.
Then it’s off to Criollo for a brunch you’ll talk about forever — a Michelin-starred interpretation of Oaxacan flavors. Expect textures, colors, and compositions that will absolutely end up in your sketchbook.
Monday, March 9 — Alebrijes & Black Pottery
A day devoted to Oaxaca’s master artisans.
First stop: San Martín Tilcajete, where fantastical alebrijes are carved and painted by hand. Bursts of color, pattern, and imagination everywhere — perfect prompts for playful sketchbook explorations.
Then we visit San Bartolo Coyotepec, home of the famous black pottery, polished to an inky, mirror-like sheen. The craftsmanship, the fire, the clay — pure inspiration.
Tonight, we gather for a farewell dinner at one of Oaxaca’s best restaurants. Expect laughter, storytelling, and sketchbooks passed around the table one last time.
Tuesday, March 10 — Farewell
Your final morning is open.
One more slow coffee. One last sketch in the courtyard. One more moment to breathe it all in.
Then it’s hugs, maybe a few tears, and a sketchbook so full of memories and marks that it might need its own boarding pass.
Meet Your Hosts
David Shillinglaw is a British artist whose sketchbooks are living laboratories places where ideas collide, mistakes are welcomed, and creativity unfolds in vibrant, playful, and unexpected ways.
For David, a sketchbook is more than pages bound together; it’s a breathing companion, a place where ideas collide, mistakes are invitations, and chaos becomes part of the magic.
His love for books began in university, when he taught himself to build them by hand. The process revealed the book as a physical object with a face, spine, body, and “ears” something sculptural and intimate, the opposite of the digital world. A handmade book is time-based, rhythmic, and full of personality. It captures what would otherwise drift away.
David’s sketchbooks travel everywhere with him from Thailand to Europe to the smallest cafés and quiet corners. They hold menus, doodles, colors that bleed overnight, pages stuck together, experiments gone wrong, experiments gone right a visual diary documenting both the world around him and the world inside him.
For this retreat, David brings his philosophy of curiosity, risk-taking, and playful exploration. He’ll guide you through a week of sketching, observing, experimenting, and constructing your own handmade book a personal vessel for everything you experience in Oaxaca.
Each participant will begin with the same blank book, but by the end of the week, every book will be completely unique: stained, marked, bent, colored, and filled with the energy of your days here.
David believes keeping a sketchbook is meditative and empowering a way to breathe, record, reflect, and reconnect. During your time together, you’ll experience the creative “hive mind” that happens in groups: shared inspiration, discoveries born from mistakes, and the electric feeling of learning alongside others.
You’ll leave not just with a handmade book, but with the skills and confidence to keep the practice alive long after the retreat ends.
Gabriela Domville is an artist and teacher with deep roots in Oaxaca and a gift for turning fragments into something soulful, playful, and alive.
Her work with collage, fabric, and found materials explores the space between beauty and impermanence. She’s drawn to that moment where things fall apart and come together and it shows in everything she makes. Gabriela’s art has been exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Textile Art, the Athenaeum, and Escondido Arts Museum, and she was awarded the Denis Diderot Grant for a 2024 residency at Château d’Orquevaux in France. Several of her students have achieved top distinctions in the International Competition at the Beit Hatfutsot Museum.
She’s been leading creative workshops for over a decade. Her sessions are tactile, grounding, and quietly transformative the kind that stay with you. With training in fashion design (Mexico City), ceramics (Florence), and fine art (San Diego), she brings both technical fluency and intuitive ease to her teaching.
Born and raised in Mexico City, Oaxaca was like her second home, Gabriela knows the city by heart. As co-leader of this retreat, she’ll help you experience it not as a tourist, but as a welcomed guest discovering its textures, rituals, and everyday magic.
