Featured Artist: GabiToma

We’re furly confident that your heart will be kittennapped by this week’s Featured Artist GabiToma. Cats may have cattitude, but there’s only love and positivity in GabiToma’s feline-filled store. She is self-admittingly “a bit obsessed with cats” but GabiToma’s designs are anything but catty (and would certainly never wake you up at 2 a.m. with incessant meowing). Her bright watercolor graphics — both cat and non-cat themed — offer a mix of delight and lighthearted joy for her audience.

GabiToma is an urban planner-turned-illustrator from Ploiești, Romania who enjoys reading, caring for her plants, and — thanks to quarantine — baking. She shares that she is “still exploring and trying new things” but that her style tends to “gravitate towards very bright color pallets and I prefer to use large shapes and a variety of textures.” Her greatest inspiration comes from her cats, Sonia and Stela, but she also enjoys looking to fashion, ceramics, jewelry, and more to help motivate and encourage her. She confesses that it can be difficult to focus on art with the stress of the pandemic and quarantine, but that she has started “writing things down and setting deadlines for tasks” which has helped her to keep her creative projects on track.

Like many artists, she struggles with self-doubt and insecurities about her work. However, she has learned that she must just “work hard, learn more and get better” every day. Today, she is proud to have illustrated several children’s stories and is eager to see what the future holds. She also finds it helpful to focus on all the elements of art creation like “pricing, licensing (copyright law), contracts” in addition to design. She shares that it is “empowering” to be able to use a platform like DBH to sell her artwork as apparel and accessories; she appreciates how she can focus on her art and expand her business as well.