Feline fans rejoice in these beautiful illustrations of lions and tigers and leopards and more!
Illustrator Owen Davey has created a new book full of every big cat you care to name, and it is gorgeous. For Crazy About Cats, Davey turned his hand-drawn illustrations into modern, colour blocked graphics in a distinctive style that includes a restricted colour palette.
"I sketched out all of the final images, scanned them, and then used a mouse and trackpad with shape and pen tools to create the finals all in Photoshop," says Davey of his creative process. "I know I should use Illustrator really, but I've been using Photoshop for over 15 years, so it's just second nature to me now."
Davey did a lot of research for the book – we love this scale chart (Image credit: Owen Davey)
Crazy About Cats is Davey's seventh book. It's a mixture of infographics, text and illustrations – we particularly like the scale chart showing big cats side by side, and the page of weird and wonderful cats with some that we'd never heard of.
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“I always start these non fiction books with the research. I spent a ridiculous amount of time rifling through books, watching documentaries, finding scientific charts, exploring the internet, and going to zoos in order to gain the knowledge to write the book," says Davey.
"Once I'd found out the stuff that I found most interesting, I started working out section headers and how the book could be broken down into its 40 pages. This was then edited by the wonderful people over at Flying Eye Books, and I began to put pencil to paper, working out compositions for pages and what might go where."
If cats aren't your thing (because you're weird) then you might prefer Davey's Mad About Moneys or Smart About Sharks, or any of the other illustrations on his website. We wonder what's next... fingers crossed for Dotty About Dinos or Pretty Excited About Pandas!
Scroll through the gallery below to see the big cat illustrations.
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The illustrations were hand-drawn, then scanned and taken into Photoshop(Image credit: Owen Davey)
Davey watched a lot of documentaries when researching Crazy About Cats(Image credit: Owen Davey)
Have you heard of all of these cats?(Image credit: Owen Davey)
The colour palette throughout the book is deliberately limited(Image credit: Owen Davey)
We love the composite image on the cover(Image credit: Owen Davey)
Davey also produces editorial illustrations and game illustrations(Image credit: Owen Davey)
Ella is Creative Bloq’s former production editor, and now works as managing editor for CB’s sister site, Woman&Home. In both roles, she helped the team to ensure content is expertly written, authoritative, timely and compelling.
While on Creative Bloq, she wrote a number of news and feature articles, specialising in graphic design and photography, attending design industry events and interviewing leading studios. She has 14 years of of editorial experience, graduating from Kingston University with a First Class Honours degree in Journalism in 2008.
Ella has written and edited magazines and websites including TechRadar.com, Digital Camera magazine, BikeRadar.com, Mollie Makes and more. She worked on professional photography website www.canon-europe.com/pro for six years, having worked her way up from production editor, to deputy editor, to editor. As such, she's a stickler for fact-checking, has too many opinions about grammar and is easily excited by a beautiful photo.
