María Ramos' illustrations turn picnic food into an assortment of cheeky characters

While we’re constantly surprised (and pleased) by the oddly-elongated bout of sunny days we’re experiencing here in England, long days of sun are a regular occurrence for Spanish illustrator María Ramos. There’s nothing better than a picnic on days like this, and María agrees, illustrating a lunch full of character in her latest book, Picnic, published by Fulgencio Pimentel.

The project was kickstarted around a year ago when María was asked to illustrate a collection of drawings around the theme of recycling for an ecological magazine. “I drew very amusing characters in one of them,” she tells It’s Nice That. “The characters were little bits and pieces of food, leftovers with faces and legs. I loved them so much that I decided to create a whole story about them in the form of a picture book.”

The publication begins “on a sunny day, with a picnic in the countryside, and then it turns into a kind of game in which every piece of food or container is transformed into something new once it has been recycled,” María explains. “As we turn the page, we discover this transformation.” From bottles of fizzy pop with a smiling face on its bottle cap, gherkins floating in brine with a cheeky smirk, to a full looking pot of coffee side eyeing a troop of espresso cups marching towards it, each picnic accompaniment has its own personality.

Readers can interpret María’s latest book in multiple ways. It could just be an imaginary tale about the secret life of your lunch components or, alternatively, as “the possibility of considering the meaning of the book in a deeper way; as a life cycle.” Either way, we love it!