It’s scary to just start painting with only a minimum of sketching, an express portrait of the tea on my desk. This attempt is in watercolour and shows the Finnish all-pervasive classic, the Moomin mug, and my jar of honey.
And another headlong dive into painting as I went along: the teapot my mother-in-law brought home from Edinburgh. Drawn with markers and colour pencils. These are raw scans from my sketchbook.
Cake vendors at the farmers’ market, a strawberry, a pumpkin action scene, half a mamey, a passionfruit leaf.
In September I started sketching food, just something fun with the materials I had to hand. I found myself in Oaxaca state, watching the creamy cocoa fat and mamey-seed drink tejate being made. It’s served in painted half gourds, with ice.
The wonder of Mexican food is that even a simple snack like a tlacoyo looks fantastic and colourful, made with blue maize dough, stuffed with broad beans and topped with cactus salad.
We have two kinds of apron, the smocks housewives wear and the fancier aprons for European-influenced cooks… and trying to draw a coriander leaf with children’s markers and crayons.
All these are scanned raw from my sketchbooks.
I had a lot of fun before 8M, International Women’s Day, creating a mix’n’match set of women’s features. Ten sets of eyes, ten mouths, ten faces, ten coiffures! I imagined this as a set of stickers celebrating all the ways to be beautiful! In the end it was a bit too much hassle but it gave me a good chuckle.
Doodles during an online meeting. See what you can do with just a few markers to hand.
Check this out, grown people from the ages of 22 to 72 having a whale of a time colouring in Sancris street scenes! Accompanied by tea, mezcal, campari, espresso, chocolate and fruit panna cotta, but most importantly by good people!
Whenever I was short on drawing inspiration, I’d add a bit to this jungle scene. This is drawn in a mix of markers and colour pencils. 
A friend was telling me about the swamps in Argentina and inspired me to draw. Most of the imagery may actually be from the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild.
You’d think that someone lounging in a hammock on the beach would stay still for more than five minutes. Not the case. My drawings of friends in hammocks ended up as express sketches – croquis – live drawing done with very little time.
But once they moved and messed up my portrait I could still work on the ropes and knots.
Hammocks define the outermost points of the person inside… it’s as if they wrap a plane around limbs and protrusions which makes for fun drawings. There’s something early-90s-computer-graphicksy about them.
And you get to feel like you did something creative on holiday.
This sketch was inspired by some hairdressers we interviewed in 2012 in Mirerani in Tanzania. Mirerani is a frontier-flavour mining town – the origin of all the world’s tanzanite, a precious stone. Our partner organisation was finding out about the social impacts of the tanzanite companies – and small-scale miners. Our interview with some women at the hairdressing salon turned into a major streetside spectacle.
Seven Survivor is a Tanzanian band who play the urban music mchiriku. This is a sketch from a gig of theirs in November 2013. (Another famous mchiriku band is Jagwa Music.) Mchiriku is a frenetic genre based on high-octane staccato drumming. The rest of the instruments and the rapping seem almost secondary to the drumming, which sounds as if the drummer is on speed; or as if he’s anticipating the end of the world any second and is trying to fit in a lifetime of drumming into a few short minutes. The pace and intensity of the drums ebbs and flows but never falls below ‘feverish’. It’s a rhythm that you can only dance to by jumping up and down, but you’d have to do that very quickly – almost vibrating! – to keep pace with the drums. The band also featured a lethargic mini-Casio keyboard player; a rapper (the lyrics are political and worth getting into), another percussionist using sturdy sticks on a small coffee table, and a guy shaking home-made maracas made with nailed-together bottle tops. Here’s a link to one of their gigs. And the main man – the drummer – was in some sort of trance with his head thrown as far back as possible. You’d need to really be at one with the flow to manage to keep that level of intensity going for hours.
Malanga Illustrations 