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Before the existence of the internet, illustrated books, encyclopedias and magazines or television documentaries were the only visual resources we had as a reference for the animals and plants that inhabit our planet. Now that we have thousands of images at our fingertips with a simple Google search, some still find paper to be irreplaceable.
Hence the survival of professions such as that of Toni Llobet, a naturalist and artist born in Barcelona, who has spent more than three decades expressing his dedication to the territory and the conservation of biodiversity through his illustrations.
Training as a naturalist
His passion for nature, like many Spaniards, came from one of the famed TV shows of one of the pioneers of environmental awareness, Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, particularly the special “Man and Earth”, broadcast on public television in the 1970s and repeated on numerous occasions.
Between the ages of 7 and 12, Llobet attended art classes at the Arc school in Barcelona. He also began his training as a naturalist as part of the nature camps organised through one of the key initiatives for environmental education in 1990’s Catalonia: the Aiguamolls (“wetlands”) of l’Empordà, whose variety of flora and fauna is one of the most important in the Mediterranean. There he learnt drawing techniques from the great masters, such as biologist and illustrator Juan Varela, and continued his training independently: in fact, he never finished his Biology studies.
The encyclopaedia of the World’s Mammals
Little could he imagine then that he would go on to undertake the mammoth task of illustration all of the mammals in the world – or most of them at least. The publishing house Lynx had previously published a world encyclopedia of birds, which included 10,000 species drawn on paper by different illustrators from around the world. They wanted to repeat the experience by compiling all the world’s known mammals, this time in digital format.
Lynx only had illustrations of the primates, and Lloret, at that time, was one of the few illustrators who worked with a graphic tablet. So he was entrusted with the remaining eight volumes which made up the “Handbook of the Mammals of the World”. In total, this meant more than 4,000 species over the course of almost a decade, starting with the most attractive (felines, antelopes…) and ending with the most complicated (mice, shrews…); in the end, the bats eluded him, and were drawn by seven other illustrators.
In the world of scientific illustration, the creative process begins with a thorough documentation process, based on field photography and videos, as well as academic books and even Google. But one of the problems that the artist faced when illustrating this gargantuan number of animals in the encyclopedia was that there were no photographic materials for many of the species which could be used for reference. In these instances, scientific descriptions and photographs preserved by natural history museums were a great help.
Environmental literacy for the general public
In parallel to the encyclopaedia of the world’s mammals, the artist has also created illustrations – and several texts – for an extensive collection of field guides to flora and fauna of natural spaces, as well as themed mini-guides, from orchids, shrubs and medicinal and aromatic plants, to deep-sea and coastal fish, seabirds, reptiles and birds of prey, not to mention vegetables and mushrooms, among many others. The vast majority are focused on Catalan and Spanish territory, but also feature some other European countries.
His many projects also include posters, calendars (such as this bird-themed one for 2024), books and even a board game, in which players compete to gather the most valuable trees, then attract species to these trees to create an ecologically balanced habitat (“Forest Shuffle”). Beyond mammals, Llobet’s catalogue of illustrations is immense, featuring more than 5,000 species of plants and animals from Europe.
He has also contributed to blogs and been featured on television programmes, in addition to establishing OxigeNATs, a multiplatform audiovisual space for the dissemination of biodiversity and the environment.
In short, every one of the illustrator’s projects seek to contribute to the environmental literacy of the general public – in other words, to raise awareness of biodiversity, the pieces of this complex puzzle that make up the world around us, in order to bring attention to the importance of preserving nature.