Buku
When in Christmas of 1992, I came across children's books personalized on-demand, I thought this could be an excellent didactic tool to cover important topics. I believed in the conservation of nature, and I decided to write and illustrate a book for children on this topic featuring extensive personalization.
I always liked writing, but after many years of not working as a graphic designer or drawing, I wondered how I would manage illustrating it. All along, I was thinking of having, as the central character, a robot with a magic widget that would take the children on adventures. I felt that using technology to illustrate a book with a robot would be fitting. I enrolled in a course to learn how to illustrate with CorelDraw, and I got a Pentium that had more memory than my old PC.
Escola Dolors Monserdà-Santapau, Barcelona.
This was a story for children, and I wanted them to choose the robot for the book. After working on several illustrations, I selected a few. I took them to the Dolors Monserdà-Santapau school, in Barcelona, to my younger daughter's class—the ideal age of my potential readers. My daughter and her classmates chose a cute robot for the book.
Bukun. Calcutta Boys School. Kolkata.
I named the robot Buku, and this was a family joke. We thought that Buku had a resemblance with one of my husband's childhood pictures. When he was a kid, my husband's nickname was Bukun. Playfully, my daughters and I decided to name the robot with a magic widget Buku.
My first book featuring Buku, was Buku i la Natura. It was published in Barcelona in 1993, in Catalan, Spanish and English. Buku i les Normes followed suit and was published the following year.
Since I published Buku i la Natura, our planet's environment has continued to degrade. Beginning 2020, COVID has allowed me to take a step back. What started as a review of Buku i la Natura, has become a new book, Saving Nature.
To reach as many children as possible, the Adventures with Buku series is not personalized. In Saving Nature Buku takes Malena, Oli, and Samu on great adventures to help them understand their world and what they can do to make it better.