The NATURAL INK. Colour Community
The NATURAL INK. Colour Community 2024
Part course, part community, part invitation to spend more time outdoors, part support to make things by hand, part radical and sacred space for care and survival, part an elemental fortification in facing the personal and collective challenges of our time.
What you will receive
12-month access to self-guided lessons in botanical ink making and nature-based creative practice.
Ink-making starter kit posted to your door.
12-month access to monthly INKLINGS paid subscriber writing on Substack.
Cost
£375 for 3 months or pay in instalments for 3 or 6 months.
Pay-what-you-can solidarity bursaries are available for marginalised folks in financial need.
Please see full pricing information below.
Through this course, you will:
Learn the process of making ink with plants and metals from found and gathered materials.
Learn how to shift raw plant colour with metals and modifiers - the witchy science bit.
Make a cluster of inks, ink-tests, and work on paper and develop the skills to keep experimenting with natural colour.
Learn skills, and create work, to share with your community and causes that are important to you.
Be supported in carving out space for your nature connection and making practice, interweaving your own inner and outer cycle awareness.
Root and refresh your creative life in ways that are meaningful to you.
Be guided in the practical steps, with regular invitations to make time for and plan your walks, making and, very importantly, your periods of pause and rest.
Be warmly invited to get stuck into the process and find your own way and style.
Be warmly welcomed as you are and supported by Kathryn.
Who is this course for?
Makers/artists/crafters/creative noodlers: You may claim yourself as an artist, or you may cringe at the thought of doing so, but you make, you explore, you create things that weren’t there before, and you want to learn more about producing your own organic artist materials. The thought of incorporating a slower, less consumptive, more traditional craft approach to your work and play makes you feel excited.
Curious folks: You are drawn to process and to asking questions about what you find. You are driven by a curiosity about how things work and like to connect the dots.
Nature lovers: You feel the power in the natural world and are connected in some way to the cycles and seasons happening inwardly and outwardly. You enjoy spending time out of doors and are drawn to plants and the landscape around you. You may have favourite plants and trees you like to hang out with, and you are curious to learn more about them. This may not have much space currently in your day-to-day but you know that you benefit from time spent in the wild, whether in town, city parks, or rural places.
Thinkers/feelers/seekers/doers: You are affected by the ecological and social challenges you are witnessing in the world. You actively engage with tending to a more care-full community and world around you, in small and/or large ways. You want to nurture a regenerative creative practice centering ecological awareness, which also includes personal rest. You recognise that no one other person or group has “the answer” on how to do/change “the things”, and you are here for the inquiry.
What you’ll get
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12 month access to an online resource space of ink-making and seasonal, nature-based creative practice
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3 monthly 2-hour online gatherings for seasonal inspiration, community and input. All sessions recorded.
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An ink-making kit posted to your door with all you need to get started. Please note that the course price includes UK postage. Get in touch for a quote for international delivery.
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12 month access to INKLINGS paid subscriber sharing on Substack for continued practice insights
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12 month access to an ongoing community space for sharing findings, asking questions, and connecting with other community members. Ongoing support for your own personal seasonal creativity, making space for the cycles of activity and rest.
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Copious payment options are offered. Solidarity discounts for marginalised folks in financial need are available.
What’s it all about?
Welcome to the NATURAL INK. community.
This is a new and emerging space for creative connection for nature lovers, feelers, thinkers, organic artists, activists, makers and the colour curious. The compilation of botanical ink making lessons and projects in here are an experiment in sharing the joy of making slow colour by hand from respectfully found and foraged plants, earth and metals.
We are living through a crescendo of poly-crises, experienced in our personal and collective lives on a planet that is showing clearly the signs of strain humans have provoked. In centring our nature connection through practices such as….
walking
spending time in green spaces in rural and urban settings
respectfully connecting with and gathering from seasonal plants
making by hand
sharing our findings and learnings with others,
…we are tending that which is sacred to our life on earth.
I welcome with curiosity, our longings for more space to do what helps us to ground, tend to our bodies and beings alongside navigating lives that demand a great deal. I have found they help me to manage my physical and mental health. Making by hand helps my emotional and thought landscapes to find ways to unwind and sense make. It is collaborative, a conversation. Centring nature dialogue within the inner and outer landscapes rather than nature dominance by outer and internalised systems of oppression.
I am stoked to now be able to share this with a growing community of people.
About me
Making colour has formed a part of my creative and personal practice for the last 8 years and I have been teaching and facilitating in art spaces for the last 16. Teaching is a significant and much loved part of my creative practice and I have brought this series of self-guided lessons together, with huge creative support from my assistant Lotus, as a way to share my skills, knowledge and findings in a spacious and accessible way.
I received an ADHD diagnosis in early 2023 and since have begun a radical overhaul of my working practices. My longing to create community around and interwoven in with these material making practices has shifted from me running around the country setting up workshops to earn a living (although I will be doing a few of these still) to working on a slower paced and body-brain friendly way to connect and skill share, all the while inviting others to join and bring themselves wherever they are at. The making by hand is the rooting. The conversations, connections and support that brew and percolate around this are the life-giving mycelium.
For more about Kathryn head here and more NATURAL INK. insights head over here.
Modules
This is a gentle step-by-step strolling journey divided into modules and a couple of projects PLUS workbooks to nurture your inner landscape exploring how to support cyclic creative practice.
You can see a preview of the ink-making lessons below.
Lesson 1 - Introduction
Meet Kathryn and their work and this community/course/ink experience.
Lesson 2 - Getting started with your kit
Start your deep dive into the ink-making process and familiarise yourself with your kit.
Lesson 3 - Plant Gathering
The first and most important part of ink-making is finding and gathering materials.
This can look like growing things in your garden, finding plants in your local park, foraging from hedgerows, and finding leftovers and peelings in your kitchen compost.
Lesson 4 - Making the Ink
How you make ink and how you document the process will be very much unique to you. Here are some basics to get you started on an endlessly delightful journey.
Lesson 5 - Using Modifiers for Colour Alchemy
Welcome to the science bit. Now we take a deeper and exciting dive into the world of modifiers.
Lesson 6 - Using Inks on the Page
Mark making, paper choices and expression - let your work blossom into artwork, writing and beauty.
Project 1 - Circular Colour Tests
A project to help guide your next steps and show you a way of experimenting with the inks.
Project 2 - Layered Writing
This project introduces ways to write and make text work with your inks in interesting and new ways.
🌱 Frequently asked questions 🌱
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For the mess makers and nature seekers. For folks who wish to live more in connection ,with the world around them. The other than human and the human. To live with care and curiosity, from the piece of land they dwell on.
For those who would like to learn about plants and ways of making their own natural colour.
Artists looking to use fewer biocidal chemical colours.
To those who are done with the heavily industrial extraction of our lands and want to continue to make a stand against this abuse.
Those who know that making, walking, being outdoors, exploring their handmaking and creative lives helps them to tend to their physical and mental health.
Crafters looking to learn about working with natural colour.
Nature lovers who cringe at the thought of referring to themselves as “artists” but would like to relate to their environment in a different way.
Those who teach and guide others in creative ways and would like to learn new skills.
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A warm invitation to come meander and marinade at your own pace for a full turn of the seasons. A whole heap of practical skills. A total refresh and rerouting of how you hand-make and create.
Ongoing support on how to weave these processes into your day to day life, and to make space for your creative nourishment.
Permission to play and explore.
The skills to make financially inexpensive, organic artist materials.
In depth insights into the process.
Support to DO as well as PAUSE in the natural ebb and flow of things.
Invitations to weave your learning into projects and communities that are meaningful to you, exploring how to share your skills and energy in care-full ways in the world.
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Ink-making kit sent to you door
Open access community space on Padlet for questions, sharing, community support and guidance from Kathryn
3 x 2-hour online meetups to support your practice
A plethora of lesson material to follow at your own pace, with new sessions added throughout the months.
Monthly INKLINGS paid subscriber access on Substack
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This is intended to be a 12 month journey so that you travel through the seasons and can slowly and spaciously gather, learn, make and connect.
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For the gentle cheerleading and support and huge permission slip, to carve out time to do what you love: spending time outdoors, learning about plants, making things, playing, experimenting and nurturing your personal and shared creative life. Together we support and embolden each other to take action to tend to the land on which we live, walk and work and to root our creative lives care.
With this direct support you are supported in your commitment to your practice.
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You can go at your own pace through the modules. Live online sessions are offered each month May-July. You can also interact with the rest of the community at any time through the community Padlet.
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£375 for the whole course
with the option to pay in instalments of £75pcm for 3 months.A number of bursary spaces are offered on a Pay What You Can basis for marginalised folks in financial need.
The cost includes UK postage - please get in touch for a quote for international delivery.
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The will to create, the hankering for community, the curiousity to investigate the world and the rhythms within it and the ink-making starter kit that we will send you. Plus an old saucepan, your kitchen hob and some plant material. All of the other bits of practical kit we will go into in the course and you can pick up as and when needed. (I find mine at carboot sales, charity shops and hardware stores. You can absolutely do this cheaply.
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Do buy a book! Head to your local library and pick up all of the books. But don’t let that it be it. Learning through doing in real time with other folks brings a supportive accountability for us to centre that which is important in our lives. We are pulled in many different directions, and if you have read this far and the thought of having this in your life brings feelings of excitement, spaciousness, peace and possibility, then I invite you to follow that.
Come along to the (free, obvs) introductory Q+A + seasonal creativity sessions or drop me an email with any questions hello@kathrynjohn.co.uk
Please select below for a single payment, or pay in instalments of 3 or 6 months.
Get anytime access to our collection of lessons and exclusive content as well as three live sessions and the benefits below.
The cost includes UK postage - please get in touch for a quote for international delivery.
We are welcoming early subscribers until 10th May.
Kits will be sent out and first lessons released in early May.
Sign up now to be there from the start.
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For any questions, queries or to discuss any access needs please get in touch at hello@kathrynjohn.co.uk.
Solidarity Discounts
Monthly pay-what-you-can solidarity bursaries are available for marginalised folks in financial need to support access to this nature-based creative community and skill share.
Please check out the Green Bottle pricing tiers guidance page for help deciding what price to pay. You will not need to explain your circumstances. This is meant as a guide only - ultimately, you choose what monthly price works for you.
If you have any questions, and to apply for a bursary space, please contact hello@kathrynjohn.co.uk
I offer solidarity discounts as a commitment to anti-capitalist practices in my business and supporting financially accessible spaces for creative community and practice.
I say this because people may assume that if I’m offering discounts, it must be because I don’t need the money.
Growing a financially sustainable livelihood through the various strands of my work and practice, as someone with a chronic illness and neurodivergent brain, I am diligently exploring ways to do this woven with generosity and commitment to community and connection. I am from a white, rural Welsh, mixed-class background and a queer and nonbinary human educated to post-graduate level as a second-generation university student. I am currently living with family in rural west Wales with the aim of growing a more sustainable working life, following a recent ADHD diagnosis and navigating ongoing chronic illness. I share this information intentionally to support financially transparent community spaces, to unravel the myth of particular narratives of success and abundance, and to de-shame living in a human body that does not fit the bill of the capitalist ideal.
(With much gratitude for the help with the wording of this from anti-capitalist business coach Bear Hebert.)
Get anytime access to our collection of lessons and exclusive content as well as three live sessions and the benefits below.
TESTIMONIAL
Kirsty - NATURAL INK. Colour Community 2023.
“A great day spent diving into the art of natural ink-making. Kathryn is an amazing guide and holds a gentle space to explore foraging and making ink. A generous day filled with play and insight allowing you to explore and connect.”
TESTIMONIAL
Malou - NATURAL INK. Colour Community 2023
“I enjoyed the seasonal colour workshop with Kathryn so much! I loved spending the day playing and getting to know hawthorn and how different modifiers (like copper and rust!) worked with the plant. Kathryn is warm, friendly and welcoming, leading the session and guiding us, while giving space to let the process and play take the lead. Really recommend Kathryn's workshops if you're interested in natural colour and ink-making with the seasons.”