Season for Escape
My name is Diana Naneva. I was born in Varna, and during my high school years I mainly focused on printmaking.
Now I’m refining my painting skills at the National Academy of Arts, but over the past two years I’ve become increasingly drawn to illustration and comics.
I’ve always admired comics as an art form, but only relatively recently have they become a medium of personal expression for me. Of course, during that time I’ve often collaborated with writers and comic book scriptwriters.
What I want to present here is primarily a self-published work – a small collection of short comics, some of which include a touch of poetry. The stories aren’t sequential and don’t follow a narrative arc. Several characters appear, and each one is absolutely sincere in their actions and words… which is exactly what I set out to achieve with this project.
Functional Neighbour
Functional… a drive toward productivity and usefulness. Neighbor… because he’s always nearby. If I could be everywhere, I would be. And if I were a machine, I’d be called that too.
I believe that to a large extent, everyone learns on their own, and most of my practice and drawing for the sake of analysis has been self-initiated. In high school, because we had the relevant classes and specializations, I became very enthusiastic about graphic techniques, and after graduation I got excited about working with color. Gradually, through this process and in this order, I fully immersed myself in the world of illustration.
The comic as a form brings together a whole spectrum of arts. There are no limits to style or means of expression. In comics, you can be both storyteller and artist at once.
Yan Bibiyan
This was the first time I worked on a children’s book, though I’ve always had the interest and desire to do so. Until now, I’ve illustrated novellas for adults, short stories, poetry, and comics — so this was definitely outside my comfort zone. What guided me in the text was the emotion and the feeling it left in me, but that’s true for every text or script I’ve illustrated.
Before I began work on the illustrations, I was curious to search for and look at older and foreign-language editions of the book. Still, we stuck to the idea of offering a fresh and different perspective. The visual concept and the attitude toward the story of Yan Bibiyan were entirely my own.
I enjoy illustrating stories with multiple meanings
At the moment, I’m working on several projects and constantly have to juggle between them. Maybe that’s also how I keep things varied throughout most of the day, since each story and project requires a different approach — there’s no chance of boredom in a process like that. I’m still in the very early stages of a new original comic, and I use every free minute to work on the story. I’m also collaborating with several scriptwriters on different narratives, and soon I’ll share more about what they’re about.
Firecurl
