Wayward Paper is part of Leatherback Travel: 489+ trips run, 4,400+ travellers, since 2019. You're not the test run.
Marius Collin crossed 40,000km overland through Asia and Europe on his way home to France, painting every place along the route. He leads every session on this trip in person, and over 400,000 people now learn from his courses online.
Hotels, meals, and every transfer between six stops across three countries are arranged before you land, down to the ferry to Brac and the catamaran to Solta. You're free of planning. Your only job is to sketch.
Sketch Mostar's Stari Most, once at dusk and again at dawn. Climb Kotor's fortress wall before the town wakes to look down over the bay. Sketch Diocletian's Palace in Split from the substructures below, and spend a full day at Krka's waterfalls. Along the way, you'll see Zlatni Rat from the cliff above it, the beach that shifts shape with the current, its water turning from turquoise near the shore to deep blue further out.
A stonemason's courtyard where students still cut blocks by hand, a family's olive grove that opens up for lunch, a field of six-hundred-year-old carved tombstones far off the main road. None of them are on a postcard yet, for no good reason. We're changing that, and you'll be the first to sketch it.
In Mostar, you paint beside Vedrana Božić in her own studio. On Solta, Vicko Buktenica teaches you the naive art style his uncle built a lifetime of work around.
Marius Collin leads every sketching session on this trip, in the field, alongside you.
Private room supplement: +$1,478 USD (total $7,437 USD) · Private room deposit: $1,859 USD
Non-participating companion (shared room): $5,425 USD · Companion deposit: $1,356 USD
Arrive in Kotor and settle above the bay. In the early evening we gather for a relaxed chat. You will learn how the days will flow, and what the journey is going to ask of you. You'll get to know your fellow travellers, your guide and the lead artist, during a yummy welcome dinner.
You'll kick off the day early and climb the old fortress wall above Kotor before the town wakes and crowds kick in. Enjoy the slow climb of the 1,350 steps, while listening to the stories of your local guide for the day. Take a break halfway at the Church of Our Lady of Remedy to catch your breath and enjoy the view together, the bay narrowing below into that long fjord-like reach it's known for. Loose thumbnails on the way up if the morning takes you that way, though the real subject is the view from the top. The rest of the morning will be quiet. Rest, swim, wander the old town, whatever your legs are asking for. In the late afternoon you'll jump on our van for a twenty-five minute drive to Perast for the day's drawing session. The light here comes in low over the baroque palazzi and bell tower lining the water, with the small island of Our Lady of the Rocks sitting just offshore like something set down on purpose. Two hours to work the terraces and the water in front of them, then dinner in Perast before the drive back.
This morning you'll be tracing the coast west from Kotor through Risan and Herceg Novi before arriving at Trebinje. You'll walk the Ottoman old town together with your Inklings crew to discover the square under its canopy of enormous plane trees and out to the Arslanagić Bridge. It's a sixteenth-century stone bridge that was taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt further upstream when the river below it was dammed. An hour, with loose pages for anyone who wants it along the way. If you'd rather sit this one out and hold your legs for Mostar, stay in the square with a coffee instead, the walk carries on and picks you back up after. Enjoy a lunch stop for some local dishes in Trebinje before we continue with our adventure. A short detour outside Stolac brings you to the Radimlja necropolis, a field of medieval stećci, carved tombstones with dancing figures worn soft by six centuries of weather. You will spend just twenty minutes here — long enough for one strange, memorable little sketch. Welcome to Mostar! As the light starts to drop, you and your Inklings crew will walk to the Lučki bridge downstream for the day's drawing session: Stari Most from the one angle where the whole arch resolves into a single clean curve against the gorge. Stay until the stone goes from gold to grey.
Same bridge, different hour. You'll be back at Stari Most first thing this morning, before the crowds and the cars are out, and it reads as an entirely different subject from last night: empty stone, cool light, nobody standing where your eye wants to rest. Drawing the same thing twice, on purpose, teaches more than drawing two different things once. Next up is a mid-morning walk into Kujundžiluk, Mostar's old coppersmith quarter. You'll meet the craftsmen still working there and the stonemasons cutting blocks by hand for the bridge's ongoing restoration. Two hours, a town exploration built around the local crafts rather than a sketching session. If you'd rather use the morning to rest, stay back at the hotel or find a café by the river instead. Enjoy some free time for lunch as you'll be getting busy again in the afternoon. You'll visit Vedrana Božić at Claire Noel Gallery in her working studio and gallery space in Mostar's old town. Vedrana paints the city itself alongside still life and portrait work, and her studio doubles as a small gallery, so the session gives you a rare look at a working artist's space rather than a staged one. Two hours with her, painting alongside someone who paints this city for a living.
You're packing your brushes again this morning as we leave Mostar and head toward Split. An hour into the drive, we'll stop at the Blagaj Tekke. You'll find yourself in the dervish lodge, which was built in the 1500s directly into the cliff face at the source of the Buna river. Slow down to observe the water running straight out of the rock. By mid-day you'll reach an olive garden owned by a local family. You'll be hungry, and it would be perfect timing as Ana and her family will be waiting for us with a picnic and local delights. This is the kind of stop with no clock on it: chats with the family, tasting their home-made olive oil, laughs shared with your fellow travellers. After lunch, two hours of drawing in the grove itself: the trees, the olives, the people working among them, whatever detail pulls you in. After that, we go to Skradin, which will be your home for tonight. The evening is yours to enjoy.
Jump on our van for a quick 30-minute drive as we're visiting Krka National Park today. Once we reach, the day is yours to move through the park at your own pace. Skradinski Buk isn't one big waterfall dropping straight down. It's more like a wide staircase, where the river tumbles down over a series of stone ledges instead of falling off a single cliff. Those stone ledges are made of travertine, a type of limestone. The river creates this rock itself, slowly depositing minerals from the water over thousands of years. So in a way, the waterfall builds its own steps as it flows. Where the water breaks over a ledge it goes white and foaming; where it settles in the pools between ledges it goes flat and bright green. The boardwalks run through the surrounding forest, so as you walk, the trees keep hiding and revealing the water. Some travellers call it the most beautiful waterfall they have seen, so today it is yours to enjoy, walk, and sketch. Lunch is somewhere in the park itself, and the sketching pace follows the water rather than a schedule. In the early afternoon, you're on a longer two-hour drive to Split, then cross by boat to Brač to arrive on your island home for the next two nights.
This morning belongs to Brač's white limestone, the same stone that the old-time masters used to build Diocletian's Palace across the water in Split. At the stonemason's school in Pučišća you will get to meet the local students who still cut blocks by hand with the tools their masters used before them. You'll enjoy the courtyard full of students, tools, and stone dust catching the light. Two and a half hours to draw people at work: the angle of a chisel, the white dust on dark clothes, the particular quality of light bouncing off cut stone. After lunch and a slower hour, you'll walk up to Vidova Gora for the view every postcard of this coast is trying to earn: Zlatni Rat beach. You'll be on the top of a cliff to enjoy the famous beach from above. The pale stone beneath you is reaching out into the sea, changing shape with the current, the way no other beach on this coast does.
A new day, a new island on your sketchbook's agenda. Before the catamaran, you'll have an early option to visit the Rasohe quarry above Splitska, where a Roman-era relief of Hercules is carved directly into the quarry wall. It was cut by the men who shipped this exact stone across to build Diocletian's Palace. It's a striking thing to stand in front of, knowing the stone in the palace and the stone in front of you came from the same cut. This one is genuinely optional: loose pages for anyone who would like to keep that on the books. If an easy morning and a slow coffee sounds better than an early stop at a quarry, take it. Late in the morning, you'll cross by catamaran to Šolta, and from there to Grohote for the day's real centrepiece: a drawing session and workshop at the Buktenica Gallery. This small gallery in the middle of the village holds the life's work of Eugen Buktenica Đenko, the painter widely credited as the founder of Šolta's naive art tradition. His works are held today in Zagreb's Croatian Museum of Naïve Art and the Zander Collection in Cologne. His nephew and heir, Vicko Buktenica, turned the family house into this gallery under the terms of Eugen's will. Vicko still paints and teaches here himself: fishing boats, farmhouses, and island life, the particular flattened, sun-bright colour that Dalmatian naive art is known for. You'll have two hours with the master Vicko, learning to see the island the way he paints it. Lunch follows in Grohote, then a short visit to a local honey producer before the evening opens up.
You'll start with early morning splashes on the ferry to Split today — what a way to start a day! Our local guide Mirjana will show us the city's brutalist neighbourhood. It consists of old concrete apartment blocks from Yugoslavia's building boom that most visitors to Split never see, since every guidebook points them straight at the old town instead. Enjoy an hour-long stroll among these giants, then time to wander or sketch loosely on your own before lunch in the newer part of the city. As the light starts to soften in the late afternoon, you and your Inklings team will walk out to Sustipan, a quiet pine-covered peninsula above the sea. You'll find yourself in the middle of walking paths cutting between old trees and epic sea cliffs, with a small church at the far end. Two hours here, everyone finding their own subject: the seashore for some, the pines for others, the church for anyone drawn to a single strong form against the water. You'll wrap this day with another page on your sketchbook and a local dinner in Split.
This morning you'll get to see Diocletian's Palace from a place that tourists never do. You'll enjoy that bird's-eye view of this extraordinary place, while you sketch it. Our local guide Mirjana walks us through the history while you work in tone rather than colour, two and a half hours learning to draw shadow and vault rather than detail. In the evening, the whole trip comes to the table for the final sketchbook reflection, held at the home of a family of musicians up in the mountains. You'll get to taste their delicious home-made local Soparnik dishes and enjoy their singing alongside turning the pages of your sketchbooks.
One last slow breakfast before your flight home. The pages may be full, but the stories behind them are only just beginning. After eleven days of drawing side by side, sharing tables, crossing borders and islands, and learning to slow down and really look, it's time to say goodbye to your fellow Inklings. Exchange contacts, compare favourite pages one last time, and pack away a sketchbook now filled with stone bridges, turquoise water, dusty quarries, olive trees and plenty of memories in between. You may be flying home today, but something tells us the Salt Coast — and the people you shared it with — will find its way into your pages for a long time yet.
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