I’ve been pleasantly surprised by boys throwing themselves at my Sancris colouring book. “Are you painting???” they might say and of course I offer to share and they take over the “Merry-go-round” or “Zinacantan”picures.
Värityskuvat
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!
Real vs drawing: fruit, vespa
Book, Colouring-in, Mexico, Sancris en Colores, Street scene, VärityskuvatThis double-spread image for my colouring book shows a typical street. I had in mind Almolonga here in Sancris, with its verdurerías (greengrocers), carnicerías (butchers) and abarrotes (corner shops). I also wanted to draw someone who pulled up next to me at a red light once: a young mum with her two kids, all on one Italika vespa, all wearing their favourite helmets. It’s typical here to see whole families on vespas but normally the driver is a man and nobody has helmets on.
And the third element is the fruit salad guy with his portable stall (a tooled-up wheelbarrow). You see these guys on street corners selling varieties of fruit in a cup. The jicaletas in the picture are slices of jícama on a stick, with a lick of jam or chili. You see juice guys, the orange-juice people with a nifty little orange-lathe for peeling. The mango seller uses a useful no-hands innovation for mango peeling: you stick a sharpened screwdriver into the base of the fruit and peel.
This is what the drawing looks like in the book; what it looked like when I was halfway through colouring it, and the final product.
You can buy the PDF print-at-home version of the whole colouring book on my Gumroad page.
The B/W original
My partly coloured version
My fully coloured version
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.
New colouring book!
Book, Colouring-in, Mexico, Publication, Sancris en Colores, Street scene, Värityskuvat
For the past three years I’ve been chipping away at a little project of mine: a colouring book featuring street scenes from San Cristóbal de las Casas in Mexico, the picturesque town I live in. There’s so much detail and colour going on that it’s hard to take much in while we stroll around… apple blossoms peeking over a wall; a house painted in turquoise and peach; Chamula women’s blouse embroidery fashions; a courtyard from the 1500s; a garage opened to sell multicoloured pastries; the breakdance crew at La Merced; street dogs rolled up to sleep; the spectacular piercings of an Argentinian hippie.
With this colouring book, I want to give us fans of Sancris a chance to sit down and contemplate it, one scene at a time. And here we can finally paint a house in magenta and purple.
I’ll be distributing in independent bookshops in Sancris. You can also buy the PDF print-at-home version of the whole colouring book here on my Gumroad page.
Colouring in the house
Colouring-in, Mexico, VärityskuvatTurns out that everyone likes to colour, even Masters students.
One of the creations of the night.
Coffee and cake
Book, Colouring-in, Inclusion, Raamattu, VärityskuvatI’ve tried my own medicine and coloured another one of the bible stories from the young people’s Bible knowledge book I drew picture for last year. Jesus is having coffee and cake with Zacchaeus and his wife.
The fun part of colouring is that you can rejoice in sofa upholstery that you’d never allow into your own house.
Genesis Colouring roadtest
Book, Colouring-in, Finland, Raamattu, Suomi, VärityskuvatI tested a printout of the colouring-in pictures that got published earlier this year, and this is how it turned out:
I had a go with all my tools: watercolour, aquarelle crayons, conference markers… but ended up sticking just to colour pencils and Stabilo Fineliners.
Genesis colouring
Book, Colouring-in, Finland, Raamattu, Suomi, VärityskuvatI tested my own product, the Bible activity package “Painiva Jumala”, by colouring in some of the “Genesis” picture. I didn’t really get into the advertised Zen mindset, but it was fun.
What colour should the dinosaur be?
Raamattu-värityskuvat julkaistu!!
Book, Colouring-in, Comics, Finland, Publication, Raamattu, Suomi, Training materials, VärityskuvatNuorille suunnattu kirja “Jumalan Niskalenkissä“, johon tein värityskuvat, on julkaistu! Lasten Keskuksen ja Kirjapajan 85-sivuinen kirja on toimintapaketti seurakunnille, jossa käsitellään Raamatun “vähemmän tunnettuja” tarinoita pelien, meditaatioiden, keskustelujen, kuunnelmien – ja värityskuvien – kautta.
Tarinat tuodaan ajankohtaiseen nuorten elämään. Verenvuototautinen nainen oli aikanaan syrjitty – kuten koulukiusatut. Antaako oma vanhempi minulle anteeksi – kuten tuhlaajapojalle? Mikä saisi nuoren naisen lähtemään anoppinsa matkaan ja jättämään kaiken tuntemansa – kuten Ruut, ja meidän aikojemme pakolaiset?
Kirjassa on myös mielenkiintoista taustatietoa Raamatun teksteistä toiminnan vetäjille. Nautin sekä värityskuvien keksimisestä ja piirtämisestä että muuhun materiaaliin tutustumisesta. Kannattaa investoida €35!
Colour some footwear
Colouring-in, Sancris en Colores, Street scene, VärityskuvatStreet scene colouring-in for adults, starting with the street level: shoes of San Cristóbal. Here seen at the solidarity economy fair!
Adults’ colouring in
Colouring-in, Events, Mexico, VärityskuvatI took a pile of my colouring-in pictures to a work party recently, reasoning that not everyone would like to join the bachata class or read a poem and this could be a nice activity for the less extroverted of us. It worked a treat! The table with the pictures and box of coloured pencils quickly became a centre for chatting and colouring.
I was also surprised over how different everybody’s style was. Antonio started by colouring the whole elephant an even grey, according to me the most boring part of the picture. Lupe coloured all the shoes and was the only one who finished in the sense of covering her whole picture in colour. Giovanna added patterns and psychedelic details to the forest scene. Both she and José Luis gave the little girl in the picture a green or blue elf skin tone. I think this could be a hit at other events too. 
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.
Colouring-in pictures
Colouring-in, Finland, Suomi, VärityskuvatAs a birthday present for my god-daughter I made her some colouring-in pictures, featuring the birthday girl in various adventures. This was fun both for me and the recipient!
I’m also working on a set of colouring-in pictures for adults! Watch this space for more, and feel free to get in touch if you’d like some of your own!
Malanga Illustrations 