Programata

"Sarcasm is always with me," she says. However, she's never kidding while choosing what to eat - she knows how and where real food comes from and has learnt to appreciate sustainability.

While she was studying Graphic art and Textile, she's an apprentice to a jeweller - in other words, it's been a while since she's mixing different genres in her work. You can now see her work until January 30th at the Astri gallery in Sofia (or in Sevlievo or at Largo in Varna), but before that, we stop her to show us some of her paintings more privately.

In her artist books, sometimes her handwriting looks like a drawing itself, and at other times you'll see a precise line telling a story.

She's not only watching films for the entertaintment - it's her way of learning about the world.

"I remember the day I decided to become a digital nomad; in fact, I remember all the days before that, when I was going crazy, that from 9 to 5 I'm supposed to stay in one place."

It's not a joke - every morning, Ivan Velichko and Ivan Vasin enter Shuka, a Moscow brand identity and graphic design studio where they act as creative directors. Inside, they draw the face of everything from T-shirts for Nike through Russia's largest shopping site to a chess championship in New York.

She likes to eat her breakfast in a jar, grows terrific tomatoes on her balcony and although she likes to write with many smilies, she'd rather hang out with her friends at a pub than on Facebook - because she has never had one.

She says she’s always thinking things through in advance, so she can hardly surprise herself. Her path does look quite logical even when looked from above – from a child she always had her nose between the covers, and even as she starts a drawing she already can’t wait to get to the next one, so she studies Book and Printing at the National Academy of Arts and continued with a master’s in Illustration in England.

She's picked up many languages (even Chinese) but she's even stronger with the visual stuff: her CV thus far revolves around graphic design, currently freelance, when whe's not accepting clients at Artelie: a small store on 44 Ekzarh Yosif Str. that concentrates the efforts of two families - Nikoleta, her husband, her sister and her sister's husband.

"I like colorful and interesting people, but I recharge myself the most when I'm alone." Maybe that's why her favorite spot in Sofia is the Rotunda yard, where it's so peaceful that time seems to stop. Otherwise you can often find her it in the small art cinemas around the city center because they show the most unusual films.

When we entered her Instagram gallery, we found ourselves among such strange creatures that we had to stay to get to know them. Dilyana often draws, for example, her dog Bobby as if he were human, and to her human characters she likes to mount skull noses, monkey tails, shark heads, eyes on the back... It sounds like a big cacophony, but her illustrations - mostly digital - are actually more thrifty than chatty, and do not suffer from excessive noise.

You may not recognize him by name, but as you look around, you will quickly remember who Aleksi is - for years he has filled the city with multicolored characters, drawn in a style you can't confuse with someone else's.

She's been into letters since school when she looked at graffiti on the streets and then tried to do similar stuff in her notebooks. Today, she has her own style, which, with precise movements, she puts on the sheet for various personal and custom projects.