The stories from the Restoration are filled with colorful individuals committed to building the kingdom of God and a community of faith.

In 2019, The Center developed the Come, Follow Me (Art Companion) alongside the Church's new doctrinal curriculum. We saw a gap in the availability of resources from contemporary Latter-day Saint sources—a rich trove of visual, literary and musical works to accompany our analysis of core Gospel principles.

Over the years, we’ve expanded our Come, Follow Me (Art Companion) to include even more resources for you, your families and your classes. We believe Church history should be accessible to everyone, including our youngest audiences.

Welcome to Our History: Color On! This is a four-part series of coloring pages by Melissa Snyder Wood. Developed for you and your families, we hope you discover opportunities for discussions and ideas as you color people and places from the early Church, starting with Palmyra. These pages go excellently with the Center’s Come, Follow Me (Art Companion) as you engage with Church history and study the Doctrine & Covenants this year.

How It Works: New Pages Every Quarter

Each quarter, two pages will be released and are designed to sit side-by-side as a full spread. The the following quarter’s pages are intended to sit beneath, forming a large poster.

Regardless of whether you choose to place the pages like a map (perhaps on a doorway or a pin board) or color them as individual pages, we hope you will take the journey with us, finding inspiration from the joys, failures, friendships and journeys of the early Saints.

From The Artist: Feeling for the Saints

Melissa writes, “When I first began the project of illustrating the beginnings of the LDS church, I admit, I wasn’t prepared for the emotional toll it would take on me. As an empathetic person, stories have always been very important to me. Because of this, I spent hours and hours researching, trying to find important buildings that became sacred because of the events that unfolded there, I wanted to illustrate all the many people who became key in bringing this church to fruition, and then the massive task of editing it down to make it manageable for both children and adults to color---it was exhausting.

“I wanted to highlight all the interesting women and men that I discovered, but alas, there’s only so much space on these papers. Please understand, this is not a comprehensive history. I encourage you to dig in and read more about these specific people and places on these pages. I made sure to include their names because each name (and many, many more) helped create the beautiful, the tragic, and the fascinating history of our Mormon story.”