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Gayle Kabaker is a painter, writer, teacher and visual storyteller

Morocco! Portugal!

And the benefits of staying in process

Gayle Kabaker

May 27

READ IN APP

Today Jennifer /@augustwren and I are announcing our first 2025 retreat - we’re going back to Morocco!

Click HERE

Join me and Jennifer for our third trip to Morocco on May 17 - 24, 2025

We‘re so excited to go back to the amazing Atlas Kasbah in Agadir. Every time I stepped out of my room, took a walk, turned a corner, walked down a street, the light, the people, the colors, the fabrics, EVERYTHING was incredibly inspiring. We’ve only offered this retreat to our Patreon and past workshop groups and it’s selling fast!

We drew Berber women demonstrating making argon oil. We were in and out of the pool all day that’s two steps from our painting tables. Daily yoga, wonderful spa treatments and a hammam right on site, tons of daily painting and drawing, a few days trips, meeting new women who might easily become new life long friends…

Interested…?

Click here to see many more photos and read all about the retreat.

I’m writing to you from from beautiful Salina, Portugal where I am resting up for a few days after teaching for a week near Lagos. What an incredible week Jennifer and I had teaching our 8th painting retreat. We learn so much every time with every retreat. This time we very purposely kept our painters in process mode as much as possible because the more process focused we are instead of product - the better the results will be after a few days. We created some really fun ‘icebreaking get to know’ you exercises for warming up every morning that not only warmed us up but also made us laugh! (Art is serious business and the art police are always nearby to throw you in art jail if you try mixing gouache with acryla gouache or put too much paint on your palette or even THINK of drawing a face because that’s just way too hard.)

But seriously, our response to most anything is - try it! If you mess it up, paint over it!

We found keeping our students in process and not focused on making finished sketchbook pages, but more just concentrating on ideas, sketches, colors and what they’re seeing without any thought to composition etc. had incredible results. The painting in their sketchbooks that began to take shape after a few days are amazing.

We always have three morning yoga sessions on our retreats but this time we did yoga every day for six days. The incredible teacher, Chloe Ward that our venue Quinta Bonita set up for us was simply put, a yogi goddess. She set the tone every morning for the magic of the day to unfold. And the food! The best vegan food I’ve ever experienced on a retreat. (Vegetarian and pescatarian options were also provided- we try to keep our retreats meat free)

Deep friendships were formed, and amazing paintings were created.

We call this ‘sketchbook throw down’ :)

Drawing faces demo - Jennifer on the left and mine on the right. Showing many ways to have fun drawing faces - as many are scared to draw faces!

I didn’t finish many paintings- which has become the norm when we teach and is why I try to take time to paint after it’s over. More to come!

We had three days in Lisbon before the workshop began and were so happy to meet one of our fave models Catarina Moita, who we’ve drawn a million times on Zoom - in person! She modeled for us on the roof of our Airbnb. We invited urban sketcher @seethelines / Alán Ramiro to come draw with us and we had such a blast!