Grab your sketch kit and come away with me to the land of legendary light!
Illlustrated Watercolor Journaling
in Provence
September 14-21, 2024
(FULL)
Just picture yourself whiling away an afternoon wandering through a quaint French village…
or sitting on a sunny hilltop, sketching the panoramic view spread out before you.
Imagine visiting a French market and smelling the heady aroma of locally harvested lavender…
or enjoying a glass of wine at a shady café with your friends.
We’ll be doing all this and more during our week together in beautiful Provence!
This painting tour is being organized by my friends, Jackie and Valerie, at French Escapade. My very first workshop with them was in Provence in 2017, and I’m thrilled that they’ve asked me to return to teach once again in a place that I felt such an affinity for the first time I was there.
On the last page of my sketchbook from that 2017 trip, I wrote about hoping to go back to Provence one day. In September 2024 I will – and you can come along!
I can’t wait to return to those charming villages with their old stone houses and blue-shuttered windows,
where bakeries can be found on every block and the smell of fresh croissants and baguettes fills the air.
Where flowers tumble from window boxes…
and a-red-geranium-in-a-shuttered-window-on-an-old-stone-building-next-to-an-ornate-balcony is enough to make you swoon!
Most tourists will barely notice some of the scenes that call to us as artists. They’re looking for the must-see sights on a list of “The Top Ten Things to See and Do in Provence”. But, if you’re like me, you love the quirky little things that speak to your heart and say, “This is beautiful. This is the real Provence.”
These are the things that call me to pull out my sketchbook. They’re the things that resonate with me.
You’ll have plenty of time to find what resonates with you as we visit towns throughout the Luberon region, meandering the winding cobblestone streets, painting onsite, eating lunch in local restaurants, and soaking up an ambience that can’t be found anyplace else in the world.
The Tour: St. Remy, Roussillon & Secret Villages!
On Day 1 of the tour, we’ll be met by our guides at the train station in Avignon. (Many of the participants opt to spend a few days in Paris before the workshop, then take the train to Avignon on Day 1, September 14, 2024.) It’s a short ride from Avignon to our hotel where we’ll have a chance to settle in, unpack, and do a little exploring.
At a champagne welcome reception that evening, we’ll have a chance to get to know each other, and I’ll give you a preview of what you can expect from the workshop. Then we’re off to the first of many gourmet dinners we’ll enjoy during the tour.
Our home base for the week will be a lovely hotel in the village of Fontaine de Vaucluse.
A river flows through the property, and shady terraces offer plenty of spots for sketching.
The rooms are comfy and well-appointed, and there are mountain views, a pool, and a hot tub. A 2-minute walk takes you to the heart of the village where you’ll find plenty of restaurants, shops, and historic points of interest.
We’ll even have a dedicated studio where we can paint when we’re not on location, or in the event that the weather doesn’t cooperate one day. My students really like having a place where they can finish up plein air sketches begun earlier in the day, or work on lettering and other page design elements which are easier to do at a table. Thankfully, my French Escapade workshops all include a studio space.
Now, back to the tour….
One day we’ll visit the village of Roussillon, which is situated on one of the largest ochre deposits in the world.
It’s a beautiful place, with houses painted in a rainbow of earth colors ranging from yellow ochre to deep burnt orange and red.
There’s so much to see there: winding lanes with stone arches, panoramic views, cute cafes, and shops selling ochre pigments.
We’ll have plenty of time to wander and explore, and sketching opportunities abound, making it challenging to choose what to draw first, but I found the ochre cliffs and this pink house (below) with a flower-filled balcony and robin’s egg-blue door irresistible on my last visit. I’m betting you will, too!
Another day we’ll leave the touristy towns behind and head for a charming hilltop village where we’ll sketch typical Provencal scenes, like honey-colored stone buildings accented with climbing vines and pots of flowers…
or a window with green shutters, and white curtains blowing in the breeze.
The view from the terraced village is spectacular, looking across the plains to Roussillon and the distant mountains.
While you’re in town, you can stop by the local church, which contains a treasure trove of Italian trompe l’oeil artwork.
While picturesque villages have their undeniable charms, our outing to Isle sur la Sorgue just might end up being your favorite day of all because…
we’re going there on market day!
Roaming around a weekly market is one of my favorite things to do when I’m in France. There are food vendors selling cheeses, sausages, olives, jams, honey, and fresh produce.
And stalls with linen clothing, home textiles, toys, ceramics, handmade soaps,
and every lavender product you could dream of.
I just love wandering around and looking at all the interesting local goodies.
And, of course, I can never resist buying a few things to take back home…
Isle sur la Sorgue, known as the Provencal Venice, is cross-crossed by canals, making it one of the most picturesque towns in the region. It’s also considered the antiques capital of Provence, with over 300 antique shops just waiting to be explored.
Grand houses and cafes line the canals, and moss- and flower-covered antique water wheels can be seen here and there, hearkening back to earlier days when the paddle wheels provided power for silk factories and paper mills in the 18th and 19th centuries.
After our shopping spree at the Isle sur la Sorgue market in the morning, we’ll have time for lunch and then spend the afternoon sketching in a shady park on the banks of the River Sorgue.
The next day will be spent close to home – we’ll be painting at the hotel and in the little village of Fontaine de Vaucluse. I’m glad we’ll have time explore and do some sketching there, because there’s so much to see. It looks like the perfect place to do a composite sketch filled with multiple images (I’ll show you how!)
Having a day at our home base will also give us a chance to catch up on some things in the studio.
And, finally, there’s Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, which is at the top of my list of places I’m looking forward to returning to on this trip.
The old town is filled with medieval buildings, inviting cafes, old stone statues and fountains, fun boutiques, and shady squares with benches where you can rest under the towering plane trees.
And just outside of Saint Remy is Saint Paul de Mausole, a monastery and pyschiatric facility where Vincent Van Gogh underwent treatment and painted some of his best-known works, including Starry Night. We’ll spend most of a day there, painting the beautiful cloister, the monastery, and the adjacent lavender fields.
Lining the pathway to the monastery are reproductions of some of the paintings Van Gogh did while a resident at St. Paul de Mausole. In a little over a year, he completed more than 150 paintings, making his time there one of the most creative periods of his short life.
The olive groves surrounding the hospital/monastery are the same ones which were growing when Vincent walked and painted there. On my first trip to Provence, I had a chance to sit with a good friend for a few hours one warm summer afternoon and paint Vincent’s olive trees.
Sitting there, quietly drawing a gnarled old olive tree and the mountain beyond, I felt connected to Vincent and all the other artists who had come here before me to paint. My friend and I both agreed that those magical hours we spent there were nothing short of a spiritual experience.
Those are the kind of experiences I hope to bring to you when you come along on this exceptional painting tour in Provence.
You’ll have the luxury of time. Time to connect with the real Provence. Time to relax and take it all in. Time to meander and find what calls to you. Time to draw and paint and make memories that, like my time in the olive grove, will stay with you forever.
The Workshop: Drawing, Painting, & Designing
Now are you ready to hear about the art portion of the trip?
We’ll be keeping a travel journal during our time together in Provence, creating colorful pages filled with ink and watercolor sketches that capture all the fun and excitement of traveling in France.
We’ll sketch outdoors on location each day, but don’t worry, I’ll give you lots of information about preparing your travel sketch kit before you leave home. You’ll have everything you need to paint comfortably outdoors, and French Escapade even provides folding chairs for us, so there’s no need to carry one in your luggage. (That leaves more room for the things you’ll buy while you’re there! 🙂
My teaching will focus on illustrated watercolor journaling and how to create a colorful, varied, and personal record of your experiences on the trip.
But the fun starts weeks before you hop on that plane to fly to Europe – I’ll be emailing you pre-trip bonus sketching lessons to get the ball rolling and help you warm up for sketching on location in Provence.
During the workshop, you’ll learn how to design dynamic pages with unique layouts, borders, and hand-lettering styles, and I’ll offer daily demonstrations of techniques for painting the subject matter you’ll encounter each day, everything from a window box filled with flowers to the an old stone building.
When we’re in the studio, you’ll paint right along with me as I demonstrate, to gain the experience you’ll need to paint confidently when we’re on location.
My students tell me that one of the best things about my workshops is the fact that, for each workshop trip, I prepare a full-color handbook which contains all of the information I cover during our time together. The handbook is customized for each tour, so it is specific to the location and subjects you’ll be painting.
It’s packed with great ideas for designing beautiful journal pages, and it includes a section of helpful step-by-step tutorials showing how to paint the subjects we encounter during the workshop. It goes hand-in-hand with my daily lessons and painting demonstrations and provides a graphic reminder of what was taught and shown in class.
The handout ensures that you can relax during the workshop, knowing that even if you can’t absorb everything during the week, you’ll have complete information that you can refer to later on. With my enthusiastic support, encouragement, and assistance, even if you’re a beginning watercolorist, you’ll surprise yourself with what you can do!
Note: The handbook is provided in PDF format prior to the workshop to allow plenty of time for printing at a local shop or at home.
I hope this gives you a good idea of what you can expect during my Provence workshop in September 2024. This will be my sixth tour with French Escapade, and I can’t say enough about how well organized their tours are and how generous they are with amenities and extras. Workshop participants on some of my earlier trips have told me that their French Escapade tour was the best they’ve ever taken. That’s high praise from people who have had a wide range of travel experiences with a lot of different companies.
One thing that sets Jackie and Valerie’s company apart from the others is that they always have someone accompanying their painting groups. They never drop us off in a location without access to a guide or translator, and there’s aways someone available to help in an emergency. They cover all the bases and are always there to advise, inform, educate, and care for us. I continue to partner with them because they take such good care of me and my students and provide exceptional service that goes above and beyond what’s expected. They make travel easy and fun!
As a bonus, when you join one of my European workshop tours, you’ll travel with a great group of people who share your interests. The friendships that grow from our shared experiences and love of art are one of the best things about a French Escapade trip.
Meet me in Provence next September, and be prepared for a fantastic holiday with lots of built-in time to sketch and paint in your travel journal. I’ll help you create the most wonderful record of our time together, and I promise that you’ll find yourself feeling more confident and excited about your journaling practice when you return home.
Something magical happens on these painting tours. I’ve seen it time and time again. You’ll be changed by our time together, and you’ll never look at the world, or your sketchbook, in the same way again.
So, if you’d like to improve your painting skills, learn more about keeping a sketchbook journal, and have more fun than you can imagine exploring some of the prettiest places in the south of France, I hope you’ll join me for this French Escapade workshop.
Let’s discover the wonders of Provence together!
Visit the French Escapade website for more information and to register for the workshop. I’d love to sketch with you in Provence next year!
PS – My workshops fill fast, so sign up soon!
Pricing
The price of the workshop/tour is $3,990 for a standard double + $550 single supplement.
More info...
Read about Leslie here.
Read about the tour operator, French Escapade, here.
Helpful FAQs about traveling abroad with French Escapade
Testimonials for French Escapade
Questions? Contact Jackie or Valerie from French Escapade here or email Leslie.
Register here.
