Cat Finnie’s digital illustrations are bright, colorful, and all-around wonderful. Known for her decorative conceptual style, her work often brings in an element of the surreal, creating images that have a dreamlike quality to them – a sense of ambiguity and the mysterious enhanced by her careful choice of color and composition.
Having graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a BA in Graphic Design, Finnie is currently based in London, where she works as a freelance illustrator, working mainly in advertising and packaging, but also dabbling in editorial illustration and animation design.
“I think that, for me, being an illustrator is as much about creating content that’s useful or informative or connects with other people as it is about making something that’s meaningful to me,” she told Sense of Creativity, stressing that both aspects are important for her. “I always try to find a way to personally connect with a piece I’m working on, so that I can put some unique perspective into it, even if it’s not obvious to others in the final illustration.”
Amongst her influences, she counts René Magritte, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Jorge Luis Borges, Hilma Af Klint, Tove Jansson, Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel García Márquez, and Ursula Le Guin. “I’m very drawn to Surrealism in particular, both in art and in literature, and I think that has a strong influence in my work,” she relays. “Where it’s appropriate – e.g, illustrating more conceptual pieces – I always try to dig down into the unconscious aspect of the subject I’m illustrating and get a feeling for what is under the surface, the undercurrent of an article.”
Take a look at some of her unique creations:
