Hello, BKFK kids. This is a bonus episode. It's all about our first published book called Too Many Cooks.

We are joined today by Surun Doc Meggian. She created the most wonderful illustrations for this book.

They're beautifully handcrafted and match the story perfectly.

We'll replay the episode after the interview, but first, let's hear from Surun about bringing words to life with art.

Surun, tell us about yourself.

I am a mostly collage artist, but as an illustrator, I'm quite passionate about telling people's stories.

When you first heard our story about the grumpy man and all those cooks, what did you see in your head?

What did the restaurant look like? What about all the cooks?

Well, I had a lot of ideas come to me all that wants, to be honest.

The restaurant, I had this vision of this really fancy spectacle and the grumpy guy he just comes in and he's like completely the opposite of his environment and he wants to disrupt the plays.

So I just thought it was so funny how different it would be. So I made him visually very, very grumpy and funny looking.

He certainly was grumpy and funny looking, especially towards the end of the book, but let's not

give that away. So can you describe your style in a way that the audience can understand? Because

it's very different and very unique. Yeah, I mean, I discovered this style very recently.

It's basically just adding layers and layers of paper.

It's like cutting out paper.

Are you talking about real paper or digital paper?

Real paper most of the time.

Sometimes I take pictures of paper and then cut them out digitally, but 99% of the time it's

real paper that I've painted in lots of different ways, adding texture with the paint brush and like

splutting paint around basically. And then just yeah, like sticking it together, which is why you can see all these fun little lines on there.

Yeah, that's what drew me towards. How did this story, too many cooks, inspire the way the characters and food were created?

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