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The Ocean Sunfish is an enormous bony fish that can weigh up to 1000 kg and occurs in ocean waters off much of Australia’s coastline. ‘When the book finally came out people told me that a lot of the animals they hadn’t heard of before and it was a wonderful way to see the beauty in these animals that you wouldn’t usually get to see,’ Sami says. Seeing the ugly animals depicted by her brush and understanding more about them has helped others to look at the ‘ugly’ creatures from a different angle, too. Whether it’s an Orangutan or an Antarctic Scale Worm, it gets the same devoted attention from her hand. The artist’s regard for her subject is evident in the fine strokes and the care that has been given to every illustration in the book. ‘There are 60 animals in the book,’ Sami says, ‘and a lot of them I had seen before, whether in books or pictures or on TV, but it wasn’t until I had to go through and paint all those details – the feathers, the wrinkles in their necks, the tiny hairs – you start to really appreciate those animals and why they have those features, whether it’s for protection, mating purposes or for survival in general.’ The process of putting these animals onto paper was transformative for the artist, helping her to see the animals a different way. The endangered Southern Cassowary, with its hard head-crest, can only be found in Australia in the rainforests of northern Queensland. Many of these features – like the thick, wrinkled crest of a cassowary – which might make these animals unappealing to our eyes, have surprising and sometimes fascinating explanations. Alongside a detailed and beautiful illustration, there is information about the animal’s habitat and behaviours, its conservation status and some of the animal’s more unusual features. The book features Australian wildlife as well as some species from other parts of the world. This was the beginning of a lasting fascination with sometimes-maligned or otherwise unattractive animals, the stars of her new book The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Ugly Animals.

‘They are always in the bins and a bit of a pest, but when I started looking into why they are in these urban areas, going through bins, instead of in their natural habitat, I found it’s because we are destroying their habitats and taking their homes.’

Sami was interested in the way people thought about ibis. Next, I drew a White Ibis, or “bin chicken”.’ ‘It started with a Californian Condor – that’s a pink, hairless thing. ‘I liked the kind of shock value of doing something a bit unusual,’ Sami says. Illustrator and author Sami Bayly grew up drawing what she saw around her, but in the midst of her Natural History Illustration degree she realised that although she loved drawing all animals, she particularly enjoyed portraying things that were a bit different.