Sketches from the local makers’ network planning meeting.
Fluffy Birkenstocks
Mexico, Sketch, sustainable developmentSketch
Angry
Mexico, Sketch, UncategorizedMy feelings during yesterday’s neighbourhood meeting to elect the new water committee… check shirt man was me on the inside.
Meeting doodles
Just for fun, Sketch
Doodles during an online meeting. See what you can do with just a few markers to hand.
Comics workshop
Sketch
Colouring Sancris: kids
Book, Colouring-in, Finland, Inclusion, kids, Mexico, Publication, Sancris en Colores, Sketch, Street scene, Suomi, Värityskuvat
Age 5 in Brighton 
Age 5 in Brighton 
Age 4 colouring in Helsinki! …no colours no problem. 
Dad-daughter collaborations 
Age 11 in Umeå 
Age 10 in Nepantla 
Age 4 in San Diego
Children typically throw themselves at the colouring book – I’m not exaggerating, it’s surprised and delighted me each time. In the case of Luana, age 4, nobody had colouring pens to hand when she received hers… but luckily my partner had a pencil and with this she started happily colouring the merry-go-round picture grey.
Another nice thing is that most kids can find “themselves” in one of the drawings. Buying sweet buns, riding a dolphin, chasing a pigeon, on dad’s shoulders, wearing a silly animal hat or teasing their brother – just look carefully and you’re in there.
Colouring Sancris: 1
Colouring-in, Finland, Just for fun, Mexico, Sancris en Colores, Sketch, Suomi, Värityskuvat
In Mexico City, four people colouring “Vespa and fruit” 
In Sastamala, colouring “Carrusel” 
In Sancris, colouring “Calles Coloniales” 
In Sancris, colouring “Felt animals” and “Decorations” 
In Borgå, colouring “Colonial houses”.
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!
Gift packaging
Sketch
I have this option for those who want to give “Sancris en Colores” as a gift: cheery yellow envelopes, calligraphy and stickers to seal the deal! (that is, seal the envelope.)
Portraits of a succulent
Botanical, Mexico, Sketch
During lockdown I haven’t been able to people-watch and hence, people-sketch… but the shapes of plants on my balcony are almost as interesting!
Real vs drawing: Animal hats
Colouring-in, Mexico, Sancris en Colores, Sketch, Street scene, Värityskuvat
Selling animal hats in Chiapa de Corzo 
The “Hats” image in the colouring book 
Animal hats in Sancris
Here in San Cristóbal de las Casas, 2200 m above sea level, when it gets cold it gets cold. The locals seize the opportunity to sell shawls, hoodies and knitted hats to the unwary tourists who left home in the sunny afternoon without enough layers… well, knitted goods and these synthetic, imported animal hats. You sometimes see whole families where everyone’s bought a different hat. Very sweet! I wanted to include this in my Sancris colouring book and now you can also decide which colour the sheep, canary and snake hats will be.
You can buy the PDF print-at-home version of the whole colouring book on my Gumroad page.
Real vs drawing: Sancris felt animals
Colouring-in, Mexico, Sancris en Colores, Sketch, Street scene, Värityskuvat
A classic felt bovine getting its portrait drawn 
My interpretations
These felt souvenirs, made in neighbouring Chamula, are a ubiquitous sight here in San Cristóbal de las Casas. I find them very cute and endearing, even though they aren’t exactly cuddly. I prefer the ones made from rough woollen felt rather than the bright synthetic felt you see more and more. The animals sometimes have bright red rings around their eyes, giving them a hungover or even deranged look. As part of the great Sancris colour anarchy, you can colour these in any (and I mean ANY) combinations you like, each panel a different hue, and remain totally true to the original style. I wanted to include these animals in my Sancris colouring book – I originally got the idea of the colouring book when I started notcing the subtle differences in the Sancris felt giraffes, and thought that it would be fun to be able to colour them to my liking.
You can buy the PDF print-at-home version of the whole colouring book here on my Gumroad page.
Real vs drawing: la Merced plaza
Colouring-in, Mexico, Sancris en Colores, Sketch, Street scene, Värityskuvat
I have a soft spot for La Merced plaza in San Cristóbal: you often see people being free and active there, doing sports and smooching their boyfriends, like in European parks. We in the capoeira group CECA used to train* on the outdoor stage at La Merced, watching the clouds lit up by the setting sun while stretching. In the photos we are practicing a sequence with Treinel Cavera (in the rasta-striped knit hat). The capoeira, breakdancing and dog-walking is what I had in mind when I drew the image of la Merced for my Sancris colouring book.
You can buy the PDF print-at-home version of the whole colouring book here on my Gumroad page.
*Now we train at Wapani cultural centre on Mondays and Wednesdays at 6 pm.
Marching and sketching at IWM
croquis, Events, Mexico, Street sceneI took my sketchbook to the International Women’s Day march and managed to jot down some 30-second croquis on the hoof.
Snacks seller
Mexico, Sketch, Street sceneSketch of the day: a woman about to start selling deep-fried snacks. She was carrying her stock, hot sauce bottle, trestle and toddler while having a phone conversation. This was in San Cristóbal’s central plaza. 
Swamp drawing
Just for fun, Sketch
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.
London Underground
Britain, Sketch, Street scene
The London Underground is a neverending flow of interesting faces. These are based on people I watched and recalled afterwards.
Oaxaca beach hippies
Comics, Mexico, Sketch, Street scene
An ink sketch of fellow travellers on the beach in Oaxaca.
Courtyard plants in Oaxaca
Botanical, Mexico, SketchDuring a recent visit to Oaxaca I sketched these plants in the courtyard of the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO). It’s a beautiful space where people were working and reading… a couple of sketching tourists fit right in.
Zapatistas at Oventic
croquis, Events, Mexico, SketchQuick pencil sketches from a cultural event at Caracol Oventic, one of the civic centres of the Zapatista movement for indigenous autonomy.
A walk in the woods
Botanical, Britain, SketchSome sketches from the Forest of Dean. Perhaps I’m the only one this fascinated by the curve of the fallen tree trunk.
An interesting fallen trunk
…this is what it looked like in real life.
And a close-up!
Drawing busts
Britain, croquis, Nib and ink, Sketch, Street scene…both marble and plaster busts, of course. The Royal Academy of Arts has a nice feature – a room where they’ve busted out (ha) (sorry) their old …busts, and made them into a pleasure/education feature by adding benches and free paper and pencils. You can sketch the busts and practice drawing. Or if you’re me, you sketch a few busts, and a few sketchers.
The mauve Uni-Ball is a very unforgiving pen for sketching, especially moving tragets like the bearded art lover. But the HB pencils provided by the museum were even less satisfying when I used them for the readers on the bench.
These guys stood still for their portraits… very still.
Sketches from Paris
croquis, France, Sketch, Street sceneI was lucky enough to see Paris a while ago, and sketch! It turned out to be a fantastic way to appreciate the art on display at the Musée du Quai Branly. When you draw, you have to watch carefully.
Sketching is a brilliant way to really see things in a museum.
The Café Industrial turned out to have a similar colonial vibe…
Palm trees, brass, beautiful waitresses and topless natives in the paintings.
Fellow café-goers.
Project teaser
Book, Events, Mexico, Sancris en Colores, Sketch, Street sceneA sketch for something bigger…
Raw from my sketchbook.
Doodle mandala
SketchCheered up two promotional notebooks from Codebus Africa with some iterative doodles.
Technically, I think that office doodles should be made with office materials. Ballpoints e.g.
Women’s festival batch 3
croquis, Events, Mexico, SketchMore croquis from the EZLN International Festival for Women who Fight! (Although the verb luchar in Spanish in this case means “struggle” as in “the ideological struggle” , rather than actually fighting. It also means wrestling, as in lucha libre. Fun with etymology.)
I drew these women during a really confused lecture on “Dismantling The Man into Things”. Hence the sceptical faces.
Women at a lecture
croquis, Mexico, SketchMore sketches from the women´s encounter in March.
I drew these during talks on masculinity in childhood (halfway through which two boys in the audience started shooting us with imaginary pistols) and on social organization as love. There was a whooooole range of talks, some weirder than the rest…
These croquis are of varying quality depending on how still the “model” was and how much time I had to draw her. I chose faces that interest me.
Zapatista women’s festival
croquis, Events, Mexico, Sketch7000 women make a noise like a low-frequency beehive. Every morning when we crawled out of our tents in the freezing, clear air, the hum was already going and it kept getting stronger as more people woke up and started looking for breakfast. The festival was organized by the Zapatista movement and hosted by Caracol 4 in Morelia. Nobody knew quite what to expect. I arrived with a contingent from Ama-Awa, the women agroecologists, carrying tents, food and water for three days. We were pleasantly surprised to find abundant flushing toilets, food outlets (although the queues did stretch out), showers and drinking water taps… all without the presence of a single man. And no alcohol either. My friend’s ten-year-old daughter could attend any session she liked without her mum having to worry. And there was plenty to choose from, ranging from lectures on land rights, Indigenous lesbianism, masculinity in childhood to art, dance and theatre and workshops for making reusable menstrual pads. And a Colombian batucada.
I sketched participants during the lectures, amazed at the sheer range of women there… tall, short, skinny, round, old, young, lawyers, hippies, gorgeous, ugly, of all colours, made-up and rolled-out-of-bed. Here are some of them.
History of the festival: http://luchadoras.mx/mujeres-zapatistas/
Amazing photos by Trasluz photographers
At the opening ceremony
This was just one of the hardcore women who brought their babies to the event and stood with them in the hot sun for hours during the first day’s plays. Wearing layers of heavy clothing and knitted black balaclavas.
Tostada seller
Smoking and chatting
The Danish delegation
San Cris felt souvenirs
Mexico, Sancris en Colores, Sketch, Street sceneWould you buy a multi-coloured felt cow with goggly orange-rimmed eyes? Of course! They are endearing! These marvels of creativity are sold by scores of handicraft sellers in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, and once you start looking, you start noticing how amazing they are. The quality of the felt, the sense of colour combination, the finishing, the creativity… Felt bulls and chickens are classics, and the current fashion is for felt unicorns and Tyrannosaurus Rexes.
Mexico City sketches: trendy Roma
Comics, croquis, Mexico, Sketch, Street sceneMore sketches based on people flitting by… a happy man at a ramen restaurant, girls passing the coffee shop in Roma and La Condesa.
Mexico City sketches: eyelashes, tree
croquis, Mexico, Street sceneI had a little bit more time to draw these: a woman in the juice bar with impeccable makeup… and the tree and bike racks outside.
Mexico City sketches
Comics, croquis, Mexico, Street sceneSketches from Calle Pedregal around the corner from the embassy. People glimpsed on the street or in the juice bar, me trying to pay attention to the detail in glimpses, without staring, drawing without them noticing…
Smoking ladies on a tiled bench outside a sex shop.
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Sketch of the day: a meeting
Mexico, SketchAgroecologists listening to a talk about alternative markets and food sovereignty in southern Brazil!
Sketch of the day: Tulum seaside
Mexico, SketchI was wearing a sweater against the afternoon wind, but got some sketches of fellow beachgoers…
Sketch of the day: Tenejapa carnival
croquis, Events, Mexico, SketchThe week-long carnival in Tenejapa in the Chiapas highlands includes several colorful elements, such as this “chasing of the cow”. The men dress in red ceremonial finery and, among other things, chase a woven-mat “cow” around the town plaza. (Later there’s “chasing the bull” at another plaza, looking exactly the same as “chasing the cow”, but at that event cameras aren’t welcome… so I figured sketchpads aren’t either). It’s a day full of symbolism and prehispanic references and local pride – also lost of whooping at jokes. It’s very contagious and after we left we spent the rest of the day going “i-e-e-e!!”
Special costume including a stuffed ocelot.
Even though he was standing still it was hard to get all the textile detailes!
The procession’s drummer.
The “cow”!
Ocelot man from another angle.
Zapatistas and zapaturistas
Events, Mexico, Sketch, sustainable developmentSome sketches from the art festival CompArte at the zapatista centre Caracol Oventic. The festival took place for a week at the campus of CIDECI with concerts, changing art shows, workshops, documentaries and theatre; and at the weekend there were performances at Oventic too.
EZLN soldiers holding the crowd barrier
An intrigueing experience for sure. This time I had a bit more time for sketches as most people stayed put watching the performances of theatre, dance, poetry and music.
A “bailable” dance
The girl band – like all the zapatistas, wearing Indigenous traditional dress and balaclavas – were a riot of energy and power.
Zapatista girl band singer
Zapatista girl band bassist
As always, people couldn’t resist filming instead of watching. Or, in my case, drawing.
Filming
Spectators
Ears
EZLN soldier holding up a crowd barrier
Sketch of the day: Scarf fashions croquis
Sketch, Street scene, Turkey
I was waiting for someone outside a mall in eastern Turkey and started noticing the women’s fashion, specifically the clothes of the ones following an Islamic dresscode with hair and limbs covered (lots dressed in the same way as women in secular places). At a first glance they all looked like they followed the same dress code: headscarf tucked in, overcoat buttoned over dress. But it quickly became apparent that the details matter. Older, more conservative-looking women had the ends of their scarf hanging down under their chin, younger and trendier ones tucked the ends into the scarf. Some had cardigans, others that strange overcoat with a double row of buttons, some floaty long vests. Skinny jeans and ballerinas were much in evidence. Muslim dresscode – here’s yet another example of how it’s not an oppressive imposition. Here are my three-second croquis done standing up in a little notebook.
Sketch of the day: faces
Comics, Mexico, Nib and ink, SketchMore ink and nib work: people on the streets of Mexico.
Sketch of the day: Street scenes
Comics, Mexico, Sketch, Street sceneFrom my sketchbook: some Mexican street images.
Sketch of the day: Valentine’s Day elephants
Events, Sketch, UncategorizedDone as part of a Valentine’s day postprandial drawathon. The guests’ productions (below) were considerably funnier.
By Mateo: cutout centre
By Carla: with 3-D wings
By Patrick: the best.
Sketch of the day: grasshopper salesman
Mexico, Sketch, Street sceneA Mexican street scene: one of the guys selling toasted snacks, peanuts and grasshoppers (chapulines) with lemon and hot sauce. (In addition to people selling macadamia nuts, creamy pastries, shoeshine services, oranges whole, peeled or juiced, cotton candy etc… and I haven’t even mentioned the textiles or child labour)
This guy was one of the least enthusiastic salesmen I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in African controlled economies.
Sketch of the day: Turks
Sketch, Street scene, TurkeySome Turkish street scenes! Dried fruit, Turkish coffee, football stripes…
A stylish gentleman having a cup of coffee
A small football fan
Vale-tudo con jujitsu…
Colouring-in, Finland, Sketch, Suomi, Uncategorized, Värityskuvat
The penultimate sketch.
I’ve got an exciting commission coming up for the Evangelical Lutheran Association for Youth in Finland, Nuorten Keskus: colouring-in pictures for young people based on biblical stories, to form part of a multimedia activity book called “Painiva Jumala”, “The wrestling God”. The book will come out in 2017 on Kirjapaja but they already needed the image for the cover: Jacob wrestling the Angel.
This is a pretty inconclusive and ambiguous story of how an anonymous person challenges Jacob to wrestle as Jacob’s on his way home to reconcile himself with his brother Esau, after making his fortune in the world… His two wives and two slave concubines and eleven children have already crossed the river and then this dude challenges Jacob to wrestle. They fight all night and in the end the only way the stranger can win is by kneeing Jacob in the groin, well, top of the thigh. When they finally introduce themselves, the stranger doesn’t say who he is but tells Jacob that his name should no longer be Jacob, but Israel, ‘he who has struggled with God’. – The theologians have an interpretation about this story representing humankind’s conflicted relationship with the deity, but I found it pretty unsatisfying, thin on motivation.
Nonetheless it presented an interesting compositional challenge: how to depict a wrestling moment where one party has the other by the neck (this is in the book’s title) but neither is obviously winning. And it couldn’t look gay, as I’m assuming that teenage boys are still one of the most gigglingly homophobic groups of people in existence, and the Youth Centre does want them involved too. And it couldn’t just be a mess of limbs writhing on the ground. Many historical paintings of this scene show a pretty boring Graeco-Roman stance with the angel and Jacob grabbing each other by the shoulders, although Gauguin´s angel in “Vision after the Sermon” has Jacob in a headlock. I wanted something with verve and action. A few hours of wrestling videos later (Finnish Olympic wrestling; aikido vs jiujitsu; Californians doing Brazilian jujitsu) I settled for a kind of theolgical MMA: the angel has Jacob in a Brazilian vale-tudo headlock, but Jacob is countering with a vingativa from capoeira.
This, in turn, reminded me of the capoeira song “Foi no clarao da lua“, a showoff song crowing about how capoeira won over jujitsu in a moonlit bout, and goes into the details of the moves used: “No vale-tudo con jujitsu… a capoeira venceu!”.
Early wrestling sketches from Krav Maga to aikido
Here’s the general idea. In a ‘vingativa’ you get a leg behind the opponent and shove them backwards over your thigh. Landed me in hospital once.
Sketch of the day: guajolotes aka turkeys
Mexico, Sketch, sustainable development, UncategorizedIn honour of the US American Thanksgiving holiday coming up, here’s a sketch of turkeys! And the small boy who was chasing them gleefully. 
These two black turkeys came high-stepping down the path like they owned the place. They were not much smaller than the smallest kids playing football on the path, and for a minute I was worried about how the beak vs cheek contact would go. But the Southside Team goalie stepped up and chased the turkeys back the way they’d come with an exuberant series of sideways leaps, as if he was swinging on invisible lianas or vaulting invisible fences. At one point he did go splat on the ground but the turkeys looked at him indignantly and beat a dignified retreat.
Turkeys are called guajolotes in Mexico and are one of the few animals to have been domesticated in Mesoamerica. Provecho!
Sketch of the day: an agroecologist
Sketch, sustainable development
At the SOCLA agroecology conference in La Plata.
Ethiopia field trip
Africa, Events, Sketch, sustainable development
These guys were watching us visit the beekeeping centre. They work for ADHENO, but Tarike is the kebede (village) manager.
The All We Can partnership conference involved a field trip to two of their Ethiopian partner organsations. I went to ADHENO’s project where they’ve spent twelve years developing conservation agriculture and reforestation. We saw beekeeping, the fuel-efficient stove workshop and the church where the project began. A great day with great people.
Sketch of the day: Kai in the dark
SketchHere’s my friend Kai at the Brian Eno exhibition in Frankfurt. The room was… dark.
at the Brian Eno exhibition.
Life drawing, bad scanning
Sketch
Life drawing with a proper model, plenty of time and a choice of materials is a welcome change from my normal practice of dashing off line sketches of passers-by after studying them for ten seconds… Here’s a sample. She’s drawn on A3 and scanned on a dinky A4 scanner, with a few technical fixes applied (with very limited success) to the horrible scan line in the middle.
Backyard chicken life drawing
Sketch, sustainable development
From the sketchbook: Do these featherballs look like chickens? No. They look like fluffy knots. Plus, they produce delicious fresh eggs and do the work of a compost. My views on the marvels of backyard chickens are expounded here!
Ladies who lunch
Mexico, Nib and ink, Sketch, Street scene
Elite ladies with expensive fashions in a city café. Sketch made with a nib and ink bottle – makes for a nice ‘live’ line.
New scanner!
Sketch, WatercolourAfter struggling for a long time with how to get watercolours into a digital medium I’ve acquired a new scanner for the purpose – an Epson V37. According to illustrator lore this is slightly less great than the truly great Epson V600 – but on the other hand it weighs about two kilos less. So now I’m looking forward to tinkering with the settings to get all those pale subtle washes onto the screen!
Here’s a test scan from the sketchbook.
I’ve had the honour to be asked to illustrate the invitation and menu for a friend’s wedding… featuring the bride & groom’s ‘spirit animals’ and the wedding venue. What a pleasure. Here are some of the pictures!
Malanga Illustrations 