Penko Gelev - Ladybug, Spotty Bug

Penko Gelev / Ladybug, Spotty Bug
Author: Dora Gabe, publisher List, 2023

Dora Gabe is a classic Bulgarian poet from the last century. Even by the late 1920s, her poems were known by heart by parents and children alike; they were published in textbooks and anthologies, and songs were written about them. She also had her favourite illustrators, the most famous of whom was the Bulgarian classic Iliya Beshkov. This selection of her poems, illustrated by Penko Gelev, was published a century later. The artist’s hand has travelled tens of kilometres over the blank page, his talent and vast experience in various genres allowing him to paint literally anything with ease. He repeats the classic model from her first editions, composing small drawings around the poems. The characters and plots originate in the text – dogs, cats, goats, a girl feeding chickens, children playing hide and seek, a boy jumping into a puddle. To a large extent, these are scenes from the lives of children from other times. And although these drawings were created digitally, their essence is analogue – drawing with ink and brush. The artist’s quick mind and knowledge of the world of children can be felt in them, and this is why the images are universal.

Ladybug, Spotty Bug

Author: Dora Gabe
Illustrator: Penko Gelev
2023
List
200 pages
180 x 240, hardback
4+
ISBN 9786197722154
Penko Gelev

Penko Gelev

Penko Gelev lives in Bulgaria, where he works as an illustrator and a comics artist. He graduated from the High School of Fine Arts. After 1991, he worked as an art editor for newspapers and magazines, and he wrote and drew the comic adaptations of Mowgli by Rudyard Kipling and The Wizard of Oz by L.Frank Baum. Together with Sotir Gelev, he created three television series. Penko Gelev has produced 22 graphic novel adaptations of famous literary works for the Salariya Book Company, which have been translated into several languages, but he also works on his own books and cartoon animations. For his illustrations for Tales of the Magic Flute in 2013, he received the Golden Lion award and the Konstantin Konstantinov award for Bulgarian children’s illustration. In 2016, together with SotirGelev, he won the Quill award for the children’s comic book Iliycho, August, and the Seven Dwarfs (Enthusiast publishing). Among the most recent books he has illustrated and designed are Detective Philip’s Christmas Case, 2022, and Ladybug, Spotty Bug, 2023.