TOO MANY CATS
Written by MAURA FINN and published by AFFIRM PRESS 2022
“Too Many Cats” is a fun, rhyming picture book featuring a put-upon dog who is forced to live with WAY too many cats.
Affirm Press have put together some marvellous teachers’ notes for Too Many Cats, which can be found here.
I loved illustrating this book. To help me keep all the cat’s markings consistent, I created a poster featuring every cat in the book, along with character ‘facts’ for each of the 31 cats. I hung this poster up on the wall next to me as I worked on the illustrations. Having a reference poster helped me hugely as it can be hard to keep track.
Maura and I had fun coming up with names for the cats in the book, such as Smeagol, Pavlova and Ming the Merciless. We also featured several cats that we know, including Maura’s cats Tabitha and Daisy.
Some of the featured kitties have passed on to the great cattery in the sky. I hope their owners appreciate having them commemorated in the pages of “Too Many Cats”.
Illustrator fact: I prefer dogs to cats and empathise with the plight of Percy the dog - one cat is ‘too many cats’ for me.
Here are some of my favourite cats from the book:
Some Working drawingS and sketches below:
A cat-pile!
Early character design for Percy - the only dog in the book.
Early character designs (digital)
An early kitty iPad sketch
From one of my scruffy sketchbooks
A cat on the loo! Very important to get the expression right.
Catty bits from sketchbook.
