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Students from the Didactic Illustration studio regularly receive awards in the Golden Ribbon competition, and recently, for example, a book by studio graduate Marto Kelbl was selected for the Bologna Ragazzi Awards at the Bologna Children's Book Fair. What's the reason for this success?

Students who come must have talent. They must have perseverance. They must have some audacity in them. To go somewhere and show themselves. To shake it off when nothing happens immediately. And the second component, which is also important for the success of our students and graduates, is the investment I put into them. The fact that I share my knowledge and my contacts with them. I started inviting publishers to the school and provided students with all my personal contacts. What took me perhaps 20, 30 years to establish, I offered to students virtually overnight. Of course, it doesn't always work out, but this is the advantage – when I started at Sutnar Faculty, I had almost 30 years of practice behind me. However, these successes are the result not only of my work but also of the work of my colleague Eva Bartošová, who has been by my side for 6 long years.

So you're a teacher?

Probably not entirely, because I almost always offer students the informal "you" form from the very beginning and tell them: I'm not your teacher, I'm your senior colleague. I see it more as giving friendly advice or helping them. I guide them not by advising them from the start or setting up that now we'll learn about some color theory, but rather I intuitively select tasks that will enrich them, that will let them experience all possible approaches and genres. Besides that, we work on commissions, because people already know about us, so institutions come to us. Currently, we're creating for the Broumov Music Festival, for the Academy of Sciences, or for the Rosenthal porcelain factory.

Please introduce the newest books illustrated by students from your studio.

There are three books. The first, a collaborative one, is being published right now and it's again one of those mosaic-type projects where we spent almost two years working on a collection of illustrations representing Czech exile and Czech migration. We named the book with the literary title Migratory Birds (Tažní ptáci). It's a book that presents personalities who either came to us or left us. We begin with the Jewish diaspora, then focus on non-Catholic exile, followed by exiles who fled after 1848 or people who wanted to find a better life somewhere abroad, usually overseas. The book also features interwar migrants, and then people who fled first from nazism and then from communism. And finally, there are personalities who left to study or even work in various parts of the world, or conversely, immigrants who come to us. I was the author of the concept at the beginning – I sorted the chapters and provided them with brief introductions. But the texts, the individual portraits, were written by renowned writer Markéta Pilátová.
The next book, Into the Clouds (Do oblak), was written by fighter pilot and future European astronaut Aleš Svoboda and illustrated by our student Barbora Burianová. The book is illustrated in a fresh way and is also interesting for its technical approach, as it's printed with spot colors.
And the third book, which is also a bachelor's thesis, will probably be published around Christmas. It's called Submarine (Ponorka) and features verses written by Robin Král. It's a kind of epic about a grandfather who sails in a submarine, someone between Noah and Nemo.

Who inspired you to become an illustrator?

I started reading quite early and was also shaped by illustrators I encountered back in the 1960s, as I come from a fairly intellectual and artistic family. My mother (sculptor Alena Kroupová) was friends with Daisy Mrázková, for example, so she would bring home her newly published books and tried to shape me with them. At the same time, I would hunt through my grandmother's library for books she grew up with during the monarchy, which I enjoyed browsing. In our library, we had, for instance, Otto's Encyclopedia, full of photos and various drawings, or the complete Bible, both Old and New Testament, illustrated by Gustave Doré. Much later, I realized that this subconsciously shaped my work with light and detail, that the French academicism that literally flowed from Doré left traces in me, just as our excellent illustrated literature of the 50s and 60s did. But given my inclination toward history and my love for detail and narrative tension, Doré's play of light and shadow was probably closer to me than flat stylization.

That's a very rational and analytical approach.

Yes, even when I illustrated fairy tales, I wanted to show who wrote them and in what environment they take place. For example, with Andersen's fairy tales – originally actually stories for adults – I tried to set them in Denmark, in Italy, in specific environments and time periods. So I even treated fairy tales as educational literature. Some people work with fantasy elements, but that was never close to me. I've always wanted to work with the essence of the time period, and additionally with atmosphere, light, and mood.

Renáta Fučíková is one of the most distinctive personalities in Czech illustration. Her work can be found in dozens of award-winning books for children and adults. Since 2018, she has led the Didactic Illustration studio at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, where she passes on her experience to young talents. Students of the studio under her guidance regularly receive awards in the Golden Ribbon competition, and their work reaches the international scene. Visitors will be able to see the latest collaborative project Migratory Birds (Tažní ptáci), mapping stories of Czech exile and migration, at the Book World Prague fair from May 15 to 18. The book will be officially presented on Thursday, May 15 at 4 PM. At the Prague fair, not only will the Didactic Illustration studio be presented, but also other studios of the Faculty of Design and Art – the Comics and Illustration for Children studio and the Book Design and Paper Shaping studio.