Every illustration in this coloring book began with a pencil, a piece of paper, and an artist who has spent 30 years drawing the places she fell in love with. Anna Berg Škvor did not set out to create a coloring book. She set out to draw Slovenia — and the coloring book became the natural frame for that work.
From Sweden to the Adriatic
Anna was born in Sweden. She studied art in Stockholm and spent her early career working in graphic design and illustration across Scandinavia. In the early 1990s, she traveled to Slovenia — then still part of Yugoslavia — and something clicked. The landscape was everything Sweden was not: Mediterranean warmth meeting Alpine drama, stone villages perched above turquoise rivers, centuries of layered history visible in every town square.
She moved to Portorož, on the Slovenian coast, and never went back. For three decades, she has lived between the salt pans of Sečovlje and the hills above the Adriatic, drawing, painting, and exhibiting. Her work has appeared in more than 35 exhibitions across Slovenia, Italy, Austria, and Sweden.
An Outsider’s Eye, an Insider’s Heart
There is something particular about the way Anna draws Slovenia. She sees it with the precision of someone who chose it — not someone who was born into it and takes it for granted. Every castle has the right number of windows. Every church steeple sits at the correct angle against its mountain backdrop. The proportions are not photographic; they are artistic. But the details are faithful.
“I draw what I see, but I draw it the way I feel it,” Anna explains. “A castle is never just a building. It is the hill it sits on, the sky behind it, the path that leads to it. I try to put all of that on one page.”
This combination — emotional response rendered with technical skill — is what makes her illustrations work as coloring pages. They are complex enough to be engaging, detailed enough to be accurate, and open enough to invite the colorist’s own interpretation.
How the Coloring Book Was Born
The idea came from observation. Anna had been drawing Slovenian landmarks for years — selling prints, exhibiting watercolors, creating commissioned illustrations for tourism materials. Visitors to her exhibitions kept saying the same thing: “I wish I could color this.”
In 2024, she selected 30 of her finest illustrations — landscapes, castles, churches, coastal scenes, alpine vistas — and adapted them for coloring. Each drawing was simplified enough to be colorable but retained the detail and accuracy of the original. The result is a book that functions simultaneously as an art book, a travel guide, and a creative toolkit.
Every illustration is accompanied by a text she wrote herself — in both Slovenian and English — describing the place, its history, and what makes it special. “I wanted people to color with knowledge,” she says. “When you know the story of a place, you color it differently.”
The Craft Behind Each Page
Anna works with pencil on paper — no digital tools, no AI generation, no shortcuts. Each illustration takes between 20 and 40 hours to complete. She visits every location in person, sketches on site, and finishes the work in her studio overlooking the Adriatic.
“Computers can make perfect lines,” she says. “But they cannot make lines that breathe. When you look at a hand-drawn illustration, you feel the hand that made it. That is what connects you to the image.”
The book is printed on 170gsm paper — thick enough for colored pencils and markers, single-sided so colors never bleed through. The A4 format gives each illustration the space it deserves.
Every Illustration Is a Love Letter
Anna often describes her work as “love letters to Slovenia, written in pencil.” After 30 years, she still discovers new angles, new light, new reasons to draw the same castle one more time. The coloring book is the distillation of that lifelong project — 30 places, 30 stories, 30 invitations to see Slovenia through an artist’s eyes.
Learn more about Anna’s work and process, or order the book to experience her illustrations firsthand.