Book illustration of a dream/nightmare scene from the novel "Felidae" (1989) by Akif Pirinçci which is a fictional detective story written in the perspective of the cat Francis who functions as the investigator here. The narrative mainly deals with a series of murders among the cats, including thriller and horror elements. Like in the scene illustrated here, the protagonist starts having disturbing nightmares after moving to his new home which subconsciously give him hints to solve the case.

Due to the importance of those nightmare sequences throughout the novel, my concept is based on an analysis and depiction of the dream emphasizing its meaning through certain visual key motives. I chose to include a puzzle structure that mainly constitutes the surrounding in reference to the whole mystery/murder case itself and the dreams allowing Francis to "move" through the riddle and find missing puzzle pieces.

The drawing style plays a lot with distorted proportions in order to create a surreal and haunting dream atmosphere. Using only black and white color undermines this abstraction while additionally referring to the color perception of cats. Furthermore, I mixed a really detailed drawing style for Francis and the cats due to them being actually part of reality with a more reduced, clean one using bold shapes for the surrounding dream material. To realize my approach, I drew the basic illustrations analogously with fineliners and ink markers and post edited them with Photoshop (e.g. distortion of puzzle pattern to create room perspective).