Instructors: Bari Zaki & Cat Bennett

Dates: Saturdays Sept 13, 20, 27 & Oct 4 from 10am–1pm (Chicago time)

This four-session workshop is the seventeenth Bookful collaboration between Cat Bennett and Bari Zaki. Our inspirations for this series are the rich colours, storytelling traditions, symbolism and themes of Indian art. Our references will be the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi, miniature paintings, and mandalas.

What you’ll make: Students will make a set of three ledger-style booklets with soft covers of Indian decorative papers: one landscape format (6” tall x 7” wide), one portrait (6” wide x 8” tall), and one square (6” x 6”). Each booklet has five Stonehenge Japanese-fold panels—so a total of ten pages. Scoring the pages at the spine edge ensures that the book opens gracefully and can lie flat.

Workshop #1: We begin with a review of workshop tools & materials. Then we will fold & trim and score our 15 Stonehenge panels to size for the three booklets. (This will generate luscious scraps, with or without the natural deckled edge intact, handy & dandy for postcards, notecards, or placecards. A scrap-happy moment.) Next we will trim our Indian decorative papers to wrap around the Stonehenge covers from front to back, and affix them with a single strip of our new favourite double-stick adhesive. We will deploy our medium awl to pierce the sewing stations, and then stitch the pages together easily & breezily. For the finale, I will demonstrate how to make a mini tassel from waxed-linen thread, which we will then tie on to the long thread tails. (For my samples I chose to make single-colour tassels, but you will have enough thread in your kit to make yours multi-coloured.)

Workshops #2, #3 & #4 – In the next 3 sessions, Cat will begin each workshop with a curated slideshow of Indian art. For our first book, we will paint a portrait of Gandhi then fill the book with his inspirational quotes and decorate them with woodblock stamping and brush drawing. In our second book, we’ll take inspiration from Indian miniature paintings to create a portrait of ourselves as the Indian goddess Kali (think woman on tiger!) and fill the book with the joyful and fanciful blooms we see in the decorative woodblock prints of India. And in our third book, which is square, we’ll create our own mandala designs, some painted, some collaged, some combined.

Cat will re-introduce gouache painting techniques to Bookful students for the first time in many books. Gouache is a water-based opaque paint that dries to a beautiful flat velvety finish. It is perfect for making small scale paintings with strong colour. An additional charm of working with gouache is that you can change a gouache painting-in-progress in ways we can’t with watercolour.

Workshop fee includes all materials (but not the tools) you’ll need to make three ledger-style books in three sizes.

15 pieces of Stonehenge (5 each of 3 sizes: 8 x 14, 6 x 14, and 6 x 16) 

6 pieces of Indian block printed papers (2 each of 3 patterns: 8 x 16) 

5 lengths of thread (5 colourways, 3 yards each) 

1 mini-woodblock stamp

Tools needed: bonefolder, triangle ruler, metal ruler, x-acto knife, medium awl, Nº 18 bookbinding needle, and scissors.

Ancillary tools needed: Sookwang adhesive roll ¼, pencil, cutting mat, cloth-covered brick, or other heavy weight.

You will receive a 20% discount on any tools ordered for the workshop (via refund after your workshop purchase). You can purchase these tools individually here. 

The two palettes as shown here (left to right) are Summer and Autumn. Please select your palette from the dropdown menu below. If you’d like to purchase an additional set of materials, you certainly can. However, you cannot accomplish this in the dropdown menu (because one set of materials is included with the workshop fee). To order additional sets of materials, please e me and I will be in touch extremely promptly. It’s $175. per additional set, with no shipping fee if you order at the same time as your workshop registration.

Cat and I look forward to sharing our love of bookbinding, drawing, gouache painting, block printing and collaging, with you in this four-session (12-ish hours-ful) live-recorded workshop!

About Cat: She was an illustrator for over 25 years for newspapers, magazines and book publishers. Cat now makes and teaches art. All three of her wonderful books are available in our shop & online: The Confident Creative, Making Art a Practice, and The Drawing Club of Improbable Dreams.

“I believe that drawing and painting create happiness. I love teaching because I get to see people discover their own creative genius!” – Cat Bennett