07/01/2026
Mikko surprises me ALL THE TIME. She spent so much time coloring this piece, from the skin color coordination to the blue sea. It was like this was the first time she was able to visually show us what she sees. She has never watched the mermaid and she was not looking at another picture to copy.
most of the time, she colors with the same color. The whole picture is typically 1-2 maybe 3 colors and never detailed in full, she would color a few things throughout the picture and it would be complete, she would be proud to show us, and we were proud to see it, no matter!
But this was different, it was different overnight. I always tell her what I like about her colorings and ask her what she likes about it, but this was different. We had so much to talk about and name looking over this picture. The details were immaculate and meticulous. I was genuinely surprised and equally impressed. Her other coloring pages were beautiful, and they were unmistakably her. I had become familiar with her style through the ones she had shown me before.
One thing she always did was bring me a stack of 30 drawings or coloring pages at a time. Each one would be colored in parts, an arm colored red on one page, blue hair on another, and so on. Every page only had a few things colored, yet to her, it was complete. She would even include pages where the entire picture was filled with a single color. They didn’t take as much time to finish, but I could always tell they took effort. It was fascinating to see the world through her eyes in pieces, and even more remarkable that she could create a complete picture by focusing on one part at a time.
This took both time and effort. It took imagination. It took the ability to recall all of the individual parts she usually separated across dozens of pages and bring them together into one. She had to recognize each element on its own while also understanding how it fit into the whole. And somehow, she did.
It made me wonder if years of drawing this way had been building toward this moment as if every page, every separate color, every isolated detail had quietly been preparing her to create one complete picture.
