site.btaBulgarian Artist Wins First Place for Natural History Illustration in Spanish Competition

Bulgarian artist and illustration Denitsa Peneva has won first place in the Natural History Illustration category of a competition run by the Spanish National Research Council. More than 500 participants took part in this year's competition, Pensoft Publishers announced.

Peneva's "European Dormice (Gliridae)" won the jury of the Illustraciencia. The illustration depicts five species of dormice inhabiting Europe: the ground dormouse (Myomimus roachi), the forest dormouse (Dryomys nitedula), the European fat dormouse (Glis glis), the common dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius), and the garden dormouse (Eliomys quercinus). Each rodent is depicted on a plant common to its habitat or diet. A snail is depicted next to the carnivorous member of the Gliridae family.

The illustration was inspired by last year's 11th International Conference on Dormice in Svilengrad (Southern Bulgaria), where a team discovered a large population of Europe's most endemic and rare species of dormouse: the ground dormouse. Almost 40 years earlier, no one had seen that rodent, Pensoft Publishers said.

Denitsa Peneva was born in Blagoevgrad (Western Bulgaria) in 1983. She graduated from the National Academy of Art in Sofia and from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts in the Netherlands. Today, she is the deputy head of the Society of Animal, Floral and Scientific Illustrators in Bulgaria.