Big Heads - Owen Davey

Owen Davey is a freelance illustrator based in Leicester. 

Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy - for The Guardian

His general plan for making work is thumbnail sketches and research, followed by concept and composition. He then uses Photoshop to finalise his imagery. 

It doesn't matter how good you render a bad idea, it will still be a bad idea. 

One thing I learnt from this session is that research is really important to his practice. For example, his book about monkeys is heavily informed by a lot of extensive research, he had a lot of knowledge of the subject and you could tell that he knew what he was talking about. I feel this is really important if you are making work that needs to be accurate or factual in some way. 

Being an illustrator is a combination of being a businessman, an artist and PR. A lot of it is based on how you deal with clients and how you promote yourself.