As we have already announced, Maya Bocheva is the winner of the national "Konstantin Konstantinov" award in the "Illustrator" category for 2018, and we had the opportunity to talk to her about the prestigious award and her work.
Congratulations, Maya! What does this award mean to you?
Thank you very much! It was a big surprise for me, but one of those pleasant ones that you didn’t even hope for, and that happens to you out of the blue. Of course, the award is also a great honor, because the people who determine it are some of the best writers and illustrators of children’s books and their assessment of my work is very important to me. It is a recognition of my “total creativity” up to this point! I later found out that last year the book “The Good Things”, which I illustrated for Nikola Raykov, was quite close to winning the award.
You won the prize with your personal project “What time is it?” from the series “This-That”. Tell us a little more about it and the work on it.
Yes, it was very important to me, because for many years I have been working on various orders related to animation and illustration, and in parallel on this project and I put my whole heart and soul into it. “This-That” is a compilation of illustration, animation and games. It is based on book editions with a series of fairy tales, in which different types of educational games are woven. In general, its idea is for children to learn while playing, which is the most natural process, especially for a child. Interestingly, in addition to books, the stories also come to life in an application for tablets and phones. “Who lit the Moon?” / “Who lit the Moon?” is a very interactive fairy tale, in which everything can be pressed and viewed and which is full of games. It is voiced by some of our most famous artists and has its own soundtrack with live music. Winner of 2 first international awards. That is why I am glad that to the success of the series I added this extremely important award for illustration – “Konstantin Konstantinov”, which has no analogue in Bulgaria and that this happened precisely for the book “What time is it? – A Guide to Time”. In it, children are introduced to the concept of Time, as well as learning to recognize the clock, but this happens again in the form of fun games, in which there is addition, multiplication, mixing colors, cooking and what not. Perhaps here is the place to clarify that I am also the author of the series and in this way it is easier for me to illustrate the book, because I come up with the text in parallel with the illustrations and the story is guided by the vision, and vice versa – the creation process itself is a compilation.
If you could choose a book from your entire work to present to the jury, which one would it be?
The latest book I'm working on right now! No way, I try to make each next book better than the previous ones.
And we'll take you back in time once again. Looking at the many books you've made, which one do you dislike today and would like to fix?
There are few books that I think I could have done better in the time it took me to make them. There's one book that I'll have a hard time finding pictures for, because I deliberately don't keep them, because it was made under rather strange circumstances - they asked me to draw and assemble it in a week. I did it and the results were, let's say, "acceptable". After that, they made me make corrections for a whole 2 months - a time in which the book could have been great if I had drawn it properly, and not had to correct something that was sketched out in a few days. Still, even it doesn't look bad when I look back at it, because under whatever circumstances I work, I really put in the maximum of myself, something that I admit sometimes exhausts me quite a bit. Rather, there is a book that I regret not being able to make. This is Maya Dalgacheva's book "How to Treat Fear of Lions Without Farting". The publishing house "Jeanette 45" had given me the text to illustrate, but we didn't know that the book had already been published by another publisher. After some time, I showed the first illustrations that I had made for the book to the author herself and she really liked them, but over time we kept drifting apart. I hope to illustrate her book one day - it would be a truly great pleasure for me! I fell in love with her stories from the first reading!
Now for the creative plans... What can we expect from you soon or not so soon?
My desire for a long time has been to continue working on the series "This-That", which is my mission and with which I want to bring a breath of fresh air to our educational system. The books and applications that I create are not textbooks, they are a little further from education, but they bring enough knowledge and an innovative approach to curiosity and learning. At the moment, in parallel with everything else, I am working on the third book of the fairy tales themselves, which is at least 2 times larger than the previous ones and it tells about ecology in general, about the disappearance of bees, about love for nature, as well as about vowels and consonants, about warm and cold colors, about notes and how they are written on the staff and many, many other games and adventures!
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