Art Retreat Week 2025

Art Retreat Week is my favorite week of the whole year. It represents a chance to be intense about my work in a way that I can’t sustain day to day. It is my own made-up residency where I play and work on my yearly to do list and play some more and just go with the flow to see where my creativity takes me.

Each year of Art Retreat Week becomes its own thing. This year was super social. One of the goals for 2025 was to be intentional about my art community. This year during Art Retreat Week, I zoomed with art friends almost every day. I loved chatting and laughing while art making. It made the week just fly by. This week also became focused on working on a lot of small things that I could use to build new, bigger things. I made a lot of collage materials over the course of the week. It was a lot of fun to not think too hard and just let my hand move.

Monday

I started out on Monday doing some journaling. Then I reread my goals for the year to see if there was anything from that list that I might want to concentrate on this week.

I got set up to make a seeded journal thinking I’d get started on it and finish it over the course of the week. After sacrificing three glue sticks to the project, I finished it in one day.

I also worked in my bookonnastick on Monday while watching a class that I bought ages ago.

Tuesday

I started dying papers early on Tuesday and by lunch this is what I’d done.

Whew! I can’t remember the last time I dyed papers and I needed my stock of papers replenished. I combine some techniques I learned in Dyed and Gone to Heaven years ago as well as some other dying tricks I’ve picked up over the years.

As these were drying I zoomed with Michelle and made scribble pages.

Wednesday

I had dropped all of the dyed pages in the bookpress overnight so I unpacked those and started drawing. I zoomed with a couple of groups and spent a huge chunk of the day drawing on papers.

Thursday

More zooming and more drawing. But I also looked through old journals for patterns that I had forgotten about. I also grabbed my copy of Draw Yourself Calm to remind myself of some patterns that I’ve used and enjoyed in the past.

Friday

I got a bit of a late start on Friday because I ended up finishing a novel I was very near the end of. Despite my extra couch time, I managed to photograph three journals so that I could print pages to use as collage fodder. I also made a list of other journals I need to photograph and went through four of them marking pages for photographing later.

I’ve photographed almost all of these pages over the years for Instagram but those images are buried in my photo archives. This year when I added “Work on building my collage library” to my concrete goals for 2025, I knew that would entail me photographing them again as close up as possible so I could use the images for printing. I made a dent in that goal this week and cleared an easy path to continue working on it.

Takeaways from Art Retreat Week 2025

This week I concentrated on making small things. Lots of small things. I watched with amazement as they accrued over the course of the week. It’s always a great reminder that small steps very much count. I’ve got a replenished stock of collage materials that are either new or are from my own work from old journals.

I enjoyed my zooms with folks. It was so affirming to work alongside other artists this week. Getting to chat while drawing was really fun. Often when I am drawing like I did this week, I’ll have a show playing and “watch” and by watch, I mean listen while I’m working on the drawing. But I did very little of that this year. Mostly I chatted with friends and worked on my projects.

It’s back to regular time this week and I am a bit sad about it. I’ve got some other projects and life things that I put off for art retreat week so now I’ve got to get going on those thing but I’m already looking forward to art retreat week next year!! If you are interested in seeing how previous Art Retreat Weeks worked, you can read about 2023 here and 2024 here.

What about you? Are you about to embark on a new project (big or small)? I’d love to hear about it! Email me or start a conversation by leaving a comment on this post! If you’d like to keep up with what I’m working on, I’d love to have you as a newsletter subscriber. I include blog posts from here, cool things I find online, and pictures of my dogs. Sign up here.