Batik

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This is a fascinating introduction to Balinese Batik techniques, tools and dyes. A fun-filled, creative workshop to produce an original design, or to try to master the detail of a traditional one. Working in vibrant colors with a skilled teacher, this class is guaranteed to be one of your most unforgettable memories of Bali.

 

Batik Workshop

 

Batik: Wearable Art

Attention is now being brought to the truly dynamic evolution of fabric art that has evolved over a millennia among the thousands of islands and the hundreds of cultures that comprise present-day Indonesia. Different fabric designs, motifs and colors identify finished fabrics with their source islands and villages. Fabric making is a labor intense craft that often requires the efforts of dozens of persons, over many weeks of long days spent boiling colors from plants and trees, drying and dyeing the hand-spun cotton and then slowly weaving repeating motifs on hand-made looms. Right now these fabrics are being marketed as fine art to the Western world, and justifiably so.

Batik is the “wearable art” for the average Indonesian. Taking a colorless cotton fabric, inventive folk have traced in wax vibrant designs of both religious and natural subjects, applied colors made from handmade dyes and produced one of a kind, wearable art. Modern artists are expanding the role of batik by using batik methods to create pictures on canvas incorporating new and exciting motifs. Today, batik fabrics run the gamut of personal taste: from expensive, textured silk sarongs bearing the traditional motifs and handmade colors developed in isolated villages over many generations; to casual day wear featuring pop-art styling and a “tie-dye” color technique. The applications for batik-craft seem to keep expanding as the Western world incorporates batik techniques and motifs into more and more artistic and cultural venues. Batik is one of those crafts which appeal to both the child’s desire to play and create, and the mature artisan’s need to express themselves through a vigorous, exacting art medium.

Sample the batik process as practiced by generations of Indonesian families. Our guru will guide you through the process of applying hot wax to a stenciled design on a fabric canvas, then you’ll apply colors to the patterned fabric- and finish the day with your new batik creation to take home with you!

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