The word “maliovanka” (мальованка) comes from the Ukrainian word “maliuvaty” (малювати), which means “to paint or draw.”  Maliovanky were generally created using a brush and paint rather than a pysachok, beeswax and dyes.

Maliovanky have been created through the years using all sorts of paints–watercolor, tempera, oil, acrylic (i.e. whatever was available). This term is also used to describe those eggs decorated using a pen and ink, and today includes eggs decorated using markers of all sorts (as in the egg pictured above right). The two examples above were created for me by a friend and pysankarstvo teacher from Volyn (left, using paint), and one of the Hutsul cooks at our 1999 summer camp (right, with markers). The latter was demonstrating to me how her family used to decorate eggs for Easter (although I suspect they used ink rather than markers).

Maliovanky have never been very common in Ukraine, but they did exist in many regions.  In his book Kulzhynsky notes examples of maliovanky (or “maliovani pysanky,” as he called them) in the collection of the Skarzhynska museum from the Voronezh, Kursk, Kharkiv and Poltava regions. He also includes several examples on the color plate № XXXIII:

Today the custom of creating maliovanky on real eggs seems out have faded out, except perhaps in the Bukovyna region, where they remained both popular and relatively common into the 1989s and 90s. Examples of Bukovynian maliovanky from the Ivan Balan collection are shown below.  In most cases, the entire egg is painted, with black being used to outline the designs.  Less commonly, a colored design (often realistic) is painted onto a natural white background.

A pysanka-like design

Bukovynian floral maliovanky

Watercolor-like maliovanky

(To view more Bukovynian maliovanky, see at the gallery here.)

Nowadays, maliovanka technique seems to be applied mostly to wooden eggs, of the Yavoriv, Hutsul and Petrykivka types.

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