Adriana Picker

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Adriana Picker: illustrator

Full transcript

“I think I have a bit of negative talk in my mind and thought processes, probably about productivity because I compare myself to other people that can follow a calendar, but when I look at what I do get done and what I achieve, that’s just my process. That’s just who I am, and I don’t need to have a calendar to get stuff done.”
– Adriana Picker

Madeleine Dore: Something that’s become almost synonymous with routine is self-care. There are self-care rituals, self-care habits, self-care planners, self-care schedules, and it makes sense. Self-care has so much to do with how we find energy and attention to navigate our days. But, just like how routines can be put on a pedestal, so too can self-care practices. It brings up a lot of questions for me. 

What is self-care and what is commercialisation? 

What is self-care and what is just another expectation for an already crowded to-do list? 

What is self-care and what is self-sabotage?

I certainly don’t have the answers, but through many conversations with people about their days, including this one I’m about to share with you today, I’ve noticed there’s a theme.

Self-care is mundane.

Self-care doesn’t have to be a product or an aspirational routine sequence. It can be going back to basics. It can be chopping vegetables. It can be tidying that one drawer to give you a sense of control. It can be making order out of chaos in any small way that we can. It can be exercising when you’d prefer not to. It can be seeing a friend, or it can be protecting your solitude.

It can be doing nothing. It can be doing hard things, like making apologies and forgiving yourself. It can be arranging your finances or filing through direct debits and cancelling them. It can be getting enough sleep. It can be taking a nap and not feeling guilty about it.

It’s often also a private moment. It’s not a bubble bath that we can share on social media, but often an ordinary, intimate moment with ourselves. 

And it’s often incomplete, this idea of self-care. It’s an ongoing process. To care is not about fixing completely, but rather fostering, trusting, and protecting. It’s very much a work in progress.

What I took away from my conversation with this weeks’ guest, illustrator Adriana Picker, is that self-care isn’t a to-do list but rather something to give space to in your days, when you need it most or otherwise.

Adriana Picker is an artist and illustrator with a lifelong passion for botanical illustration in particular. She always drew as a child and was inspired by family and friends who were also really creative. But she was actually determined not to be an artist. The great narrative with the struggling artist saw her pursue a design career instead.

She ended up, in turn, in theatre and film. She found herself working with Australian costume designer, Catherine Martin. It was this internship that she was able to find her way back to art, imploring her skills as an illustrator to work on films including The Great Gatsby. Soon she saw that it was possible to pave a career as an artist.

Now, Adriana has a career many illustrators would pine for. She’s held numerous exhibitions of her illustrations and paintings. Her list of clients includes Vogue, Gourmet Traveller, Mecca Cosmetics, and [inaudible 04:38].

She’s illustrated three books, all published by Hardie Grant Australia. Her fourth book, Petal: A World of Flowers Through an Artist’s Eye is soon to be published and available for preorder.

Despite the impressive buyer and the dream projects, in our conversation, Adriana opens up about a particular variety of a creative rut, which is often spurred on from doing the thing that you love to the point of exhaustion.

Adriana is candid about the privileges and the pitfalls of working on dream projects. She shares how she had to return to the mundane, ordinary, basic elements of self-care to rebuild after burnout.

We talk about the book writing process, living in New York City, seasonal routines, saying no, productive rest, and whether you’re in the ebb or the flow, the winter fallow or the blossoming spring. It’s all relevant and important to the creative process.

How are you today? What’s going on? What have you been thinking about?

Adriana Picker: That’s a big question to start on, isn’t it?

MD: It is. I think that we’re not often asked…we’re asked, “What are you doing?” but we’re not asked, “What are you thinking?”, and I’m trying to ask people more because I think it gives a little window.

AP: It’s also very thought-provoking, isn’t it? I have been thinking a lot lately about the kindness of strangers and how, especially in a city as big as New York, how we are really…not conditioned, but it’s this really lovely thing that I think keeps the city running. Because it’s so condensed here and there’s so many people, I think that people are really aware of other people around them and how each interaction could contribute to somebody else’s day.

So, for example, moving your legs back when somebody passes you on the subway to make room, and holding a door open for somebody, and things like that. I really have been observing other people’s interactions lately as I travel through the city. Just noticing and being aware of small moments of kindness.

MD: I love that. Do you think it makes you aware of being more kind as well?

AP: Definitely, yeah. Watching how other people interact and how somebody’s mood can transform somebody else’s mood is a really lovely thing.

MD: And I love that, especially as we’re about to talk about your routine. These kind of things that we build into our routines, little day brighteners. So what are your days looking like at the moment? Because you’ve just had a huge project sort of wrap up. There’s still going to be a lot to do, but do you want to tell us a little bit about maybe where you’ve been?

AP: This year has been a really interesting and productive one for me. I spent four to five months working really intensely on my next book. It’s called Petal. It’s 250 pages of botanical illustration. It’s 27 chapters broken up into plant family.

It’s just flowers as well. It’s not broadly about the plant world. It really focuses on flowers. It’s an absolute passion project for me. It’s a real dream project. And, because I had so much invested in it and was so in love, it’s an extreme amount of work. I put everything that I had for four to five months into it. I was working seven days a week mostly, and really long days.

By the end of it, I was just completely burned out. I’d been giving everything creatively and in this really intense creative space, I hadn’t been looking after myself. Everything in my life was just surrounded around work.

MD: For those who might not be familiar with the book composal and writing process, could you maybe demonstrate how that worked out for you, but also why it does need to be so intense? Why is it seven days’ work when you’re working on a book?

AP: I don’t think it needs to be so intense, so I think it was just, for me, a matter of not allowing myself enough time. I was overly optimistic about how much time it would take me, or maybe I was just deluded because it ended up being something like 196 illustrations in the book, including a lot of double-page spreads, so it’s a huge amount of work for me.

The process started in…this will be my fourth book, and my fourth book with the same publisher, Hardie Grant, which is based in Australia, and the process started in 2017. I wrote a pitch and then I took that pitch to the publisher and they agreed to do it, which I was just over the moon about because it was quite a big proposal. It’s a big book and it’s a big investment for them. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before and it was one of those projects that was reaching for the stars. I didn’t know if I’d get it off the ground.

We agreed to do the project together and I got my advance in January 2018. We agreed to publish it in 2020, which allowed some more breadth so I spent 2018 researching, thinking about the structure of the book and coming up with that, and then we engaged a really wonderful writer, Nina Rousseau, who worked on it with me. 

She did the chapter openings and in June 2019, so this year, I went home to Australia for a month and really started the illustration process in earnest. I sequestered myself away and was able to really start the process, do all the conceptual thinking behind the illustrations, so that when I came back to New York, it felt a bit more mechanical, like I was just finishing these illustrations, which is a very different thought process to that sort of conceptual planning process.

For me, it becomes more subconscious. I don’t want to say I’m going through the motions, but it’s a well-worn path for me, so it’s much easier to drown out the distractions of New York and just work.

MD: And then have a quota of illustrations per day, and so that becomes quite [inaudible 11:14].

AP: Yes.

MD: Few little threads there because, with the book-writing process, you have to really switch gears. I imagine with the research process, you almost need to be more open and allow for discovery, and sometimes I feel like we, as people, make it difficult to let yourself have freedom and explore and even be bored while you’re in modes of discovery. What was that like for you?

AP: The research, I think, actually was one of the most difficult parts of the process for me, in a sense, because my love for botany and for plants and for flowers is so large and it’s such a large subject matter. Like orchids have so many sub-species and just thousands of family members.

Narrowing down the selection of what to include was the hardest. For me, it was this fear of leaving things out because each family member in the book has probably a maximum of ten flowers in it to illustrate, and to condense the orchid family down to ten flowers was excruciating.

MD: What was the process then? How did you divide up your days to research? How did you work with these constraints? How did you make decisions?

AP: Decision making is very hard, especially when, because I had placed so much emotional value on the project for me, every decision became a little bit fraught. I really didn’t have a routine with the research process because I was fitting it in between other commercial commissions, so it was just when I had a free day, I would work on it.

Historically, I’m not somebody who has a great routine. I do get up and go to work the same. I ride a bike to work every day and work at basically the same place, but apart from that, I’m not the type of person that has a calendar with things. I tend to be a little bit more reactive and just respond to what deadlines, in terms of commissions, I have and what I can fit in between that, and then who wants to have lunch with me.

MD: I like it. It’s like there’s a scaffold, but the shape of it can be different every day. Looking back now, do you have any advice on decision making?

AP: I think it’s a matter of getting started. Things will fall into place if you make one decision. So, for me, I think I tried to go a bit too broad first. What I needed to do was perhaps hone in a little bit quicker than I did because I was looking at everything in a really broad sense and focusing perhaps on one family and deciding to get a little bit of structure.

I think the mind works well, in a sense, when you’re not looking at a really big, broad swathe of work and everything is floating around and there’s no structure or cohesion to grab onto, so everything just feels a bit overwhelming in terms of decision.

Once I started finding a structure for each family, it became a bit easier, but I still wasn’t very kind to my publisher in the sense that I didn’t make decisions in a very timely fashion and was changing my mind. I didn’t give them a complete chapter listing until the very last minute, so they were very generous in how they worked with me on this book and how they responded to my process, rather than trying to force something that’s more rigid on me and would’ve created a lot of anxiety for me.

MD: Yeah, it’s important to have the right fit in that sense. So if we move along this process a little bit more, you said you came back to New York from Australia and you had the tasks to do the illustrations and you just dedicated seven days a week to it. I’d love to hear what happens. How did you put commercial work aside? How did you put your social life aside? How did you immerse yourself in this?

AP: I’ve got quite a good habit or routine or doing really intense periods of work. I’ve done it several times before on the last three books that I’ve done, but also when I’m doing an exhibition of fine arts or paintings. I seem to work quite well under a tight deadline, under pressure.

It’s almost like the deadline gives you this impetus to make a decision, instead of your thoughts milling around, and you go more on instinct. My first instinct, generally, is always the right one, creatively. So, in a way, it blocks out the noise and I can really focus on these good creative thoughts that come through.

My process for really shutting everything out, my mum and dad live on a property in rural New South Wales, and I went home for a month and my very lovely parents would make food for me and I’d just sit in my pyjamas all day on the couch and draw.

MD: Amazing. What a great residency.

AP: It really is. It’s a very comforting, solid base, where I don’t have to think. They’re so generous. I don’t have to think about anything else that’s going on in my life. I can just go really deeply into this creative process, be it stay in my pyjamas, I can go draw in the paddock if I want to, which I find really beautiful and lovely, and Brian will bring me lunch.

MD: Lovely. Is it sometimes tempting to go the other way and take a lot of leisure time? Or are you so used to it that you don’t?

AP: No, I don’t. I really don’t take leisure time. I was under such a tight deadline, it’s really an opportunity for me to not have to worry about grocery shopping, not have to worry. Parents are so beautiful. Literally I just go into this really intense period of focus and the only thing I do is work, or I have a couple of favourite bush walks that I go on when I’m up there, and it just really clears my mind and I can centre and ground and focus, and then go back into the work.

MD: I love that. And then when you came back to New York, how do you say no to other work or to social stuff?

AP: I did take some commercial jobs during that period, just because I needed to pay my rent. I need to keep everything going. But I do say no to a lot of social things when I’m in that period. I think, this time, I definitely did it for too long. I wouldn’t want to do it for three to four months ever again. It ended up being quite a real test of endurance and mentally put me in a pretty dark place towards the end of it.

MD: Why do you think that is? What exactly about it? Is it the lack of social contact?

AP: It’s imbalance. Towards the end of the process, I was so far into the creative processes and so stressed and so anxious about all the deadlines, even having downtime made me feel worse. 

It’s definitely counter-productive to not take rest, and having gone through that and having put myself through that, past my limits of coping, I have now really changed my behaviour and really sort of latch onto this idea of productive rest. Seeing the rest and seeing the recovery as a huge part of the creative process and a really important part.

MD: It’s crucial. I have my event series Side Project Sessions, which you’ve come along to, and I really try and emphasise that taking a break is as important as those moments of flow because it enables us to sustain our work throughout.

AP: Exactly. This example, this year, is a really extreme example for me. But I think it’s almost like I needed to go through this to have a reset and push myself out on the other side to create some really healthy and strong small routines in my personal life to support the creativity.

It’s almost like I started some really bad habits in the beginning of my creative career, where I was so anxious and stressed about…I think this is really common. When you first start out freelancing, you think the job you have right now is the last job you’re going to get, so having rest can become a really stressful time.

Taking time out when you’re not working, when you’re not being productive, actually becomes anxious. It was anxiety for me because I wasn’t working, so perhaps everything had dried up and everything is going to stop, and I was never going to get another job again.

MD: It’s for your mind, isn’t it?

AP: It’s taken me…I don’t know how long I’ve been freelancing. Maybe four or five years? It’s taken me that long to reset that mindset and to really start to believe that rest can be productive and important, and there are seasons of creativity, and that the fallow winter is just as important as the bountiful, productive spring.

MD: Exactly. You need both in order to…Not everything grows simultaneously, so you need that time for reflection to be able to put something out into the world. That theme keeps coming up again and again, this idea of seasons, which is lovely to see because it really is the ebb and the flow that we need. Just a little bit more on that intense period, walk us through a day, if you could.

AP: It became a bit more intense towards the end and I think, particularly, moving to New York has been this humbling experience for me in a really positive way. I moved here thinking that I was going to prove to myself that I could do everything by myself and I didn’t need anybody, and I was this strong independent woman.

But I think something about moving to New York, and particularly this project, has made me realise in a really nice way is that I don’t have to do everything by myself. And community and friendship and support are so important, and it doesn’t diminish me at all to ask for support.

The last few weeks of the project particularly was so intense. I was waking up at six o’clock in the morning, starting drawing in bed. I didn’t leave the house because the outside world had just become too exhausting for me. Everything, all my energy, was going into the creativity and into the process and I’d work basically until I’d exhausted myself, and sometimes that was 2am in the morning and then I’d start it all again the next day.

One of my closest friends, Emma, and I have been friends since high school in Toronto in Australia, and she and I have been friends since we were 13 and she lives down the street from me here in New York now and she has been so supportive through this process. Brings me food, she made me this really beautiful…

I’m a very disorganised person. I really usually work in this realm of disorganised chaos and creativity. It’s this mess that I know where everything is.

MD: Yeah. I think that’s how connections can be made though, so it’s important.

AP: Yeah, but her brain works very differently from mine. She loves a spreadsheet.

MD: Oh, yeah. I can relate.

AP: I don’t know what a spreadsheet is. But she made me this really beautiful visual organisation system. She got two big boards of cardboard and put little markers for each drawing I still had to do in each chapter, and then had another one for all the days I had to do them in, and so I’d move one over a drawing.

MD: Oh, I love that. What a wonderful gift to give someone when you have that kind of complementary skill.

AP: I know, and she did it without asking and it was so sweet, and it really actually helped me because I was like, ooh, I’ve done one drawing, I can have this small sense of reward rather than just looking at this huge overwhelming, what was something like 96 illustrations to finish at the time.

MD: Yes, it comes back to our human brains not being able to handle that. There’s a beautiful book by Anne Lamott called Bird by Bird and it really is about how do you… she’s describing her brother having this huge assignment of drawing multiple birds. It’s very relevant, actually. And the father’s advice was will you get this done by taking it bird by bird? 

AP: Yeah, breaking it down.

MD: And just making it visual by moving it over is wonderful.

AP: Yeah, breaking it down piece by piece into manageable bites, rather than being overwhelmed by this great, big, huge presence.

MD: Exactly. I think it’d be great to hear how you’ve moved through this, but I’m curious to hear, because you’ve got an amazing career as a freelance illustrator who is extremely talented, you’ve got four books behind you, you’ve got a wealth of amazing clients, and you’re talented and you’re passionate. 

I think a lot of talented and passionate people get told that they’re so lucky they get to do what they love. But then this is such an interesting contrast to that, is that you were doing what you love seven days a week, but it threw you around so much.

AP: I know. I actually thought about that a lot during the process, and it was kind of torturous in the sense that I was doing my dream project, something that I’ve wanted to do and had spent so much time thinking about and pitching about, and it was destroying me. And the lesson in that is that I didn’t plan it very well. 

I think if I had thought about actually the amount of time I needed to give to it, I don’t know that I would’ve done it because it definitely was a labour of love and if I broke down the amount of money I got paid for how long it took, it’s not much money. So in a business sense, I think my mind kind of just switched off to that reality so I could do the work.

MD: Yeah, I think that’s common with a lot of books if you think about the numbers. 

AP: I know. But I didn’t become an illustrator because money is my idea of success. It’s not. My idea of success is getting to do what I love every day. And, again, that was maybe one of the reasons why it was so upsetting to me. I’m doing my dream project, my dream job, and it’s destroying me, but it was imbalanced. 

MD: So it was just all about timing and planning?

AP: Yes.

MD: So obviously lots of lessons would’ve come out of that.

AP: So many lessons.

MD: Do you want to tell us a bit? Did you crash afterwards?

AP: I’m really proud of myself for the way I handled it. I didn’t try and fix myself at the time, which I think was really important. I was like, this is how I am right now, and that’s okay. You just need to give yourself time, you need to do whatever you feel like right now.

But I have some great support systems in place. I speak to this really wonderful woman who is what I call a bit of a spiritual mentor and she and I had been talking for quite a few years and she’s been a great support to me, and I suppose I use her in the place of a psychologist. So I spoke to her a lot. I knew that these are the things that I need to do to make myself feel better.

MD: What was her advice to you during this time?

AP: I think what is really helpful with talking to Missy is not such that she offers advice, she just has this really beautiful way of explaining to me how I am feeling right now and just clarifying that.

MD: That’s so powerful. Like a sounding board for our feelings.

AP: Yeah, exactly. And just calming things down and saying that’s okay, you don’t need to try and fix anything right now, you’re okay. But it was little things. A couple of the symptoms of the burn out that I had was I’d developed a little bit of OCD.

MD: Oh, how so?

AP: I know. I don’t usually have any of those tendencies in my life, but I started really obsessing about cleanliness. So keeping my house clean, lining up my shoes, my sock drawer is colour-coordinated at the moment, and that was really freaking me out. But then I took a step back from it and I realised that, in a really beautiful way, it was my brain protecting itself.

There was this disorder in my brain, and it was my brain just wanting to create a bit of order in chaos. Again, coming back to that concept of not trying to fix anything, this is just what I need to do right now to feel some order in my life.

So I think the process that started me healing from the burn out was I started coming back to my domestic self, rather than this really creative self, an area that I’d been in for months. I’d really gone far outside of my body and my normal life, into this really creative process, and so to bring it back I just started very slowly coming back into my domestic life.

Like cooking again. I really love cooking and I’d stopped cooking during this process because I just didn’t have the energy. Slowly, slowly bringing really small achievable tasks, like picking up my dry cleaning that I hadn’t done in months. So it was a small sense of achievement and order, but nothing too strenuous.

MD: Yeah, I can see how that would really create a centre. And so now how has this influenced your routine? Because you’ve made a few twigs. Do you want to tell us about those slight twigs that you’ve made to your routine?

AP: Yes. It’s been a really lovely process. I think it’s come from grounding and centring myself in a domestic routine. I really enjoy going and buying and selecting the vegetables and all these sort of domestic things that I feel are a really important part of life that we often overlook.

MD: Or trivialise as well.

AP: Or trivialise, yeah. So for me, over this time, the concept of self-care has really changed and it’s gone from viewing self-care as buying an expensive face mask or a nice candle or something, and it’s gone from that to something that’s much more mundane. 

Self-care has become about folding my washing in a timely fashion after bringing it out of the dryer. And cooking for myself. And flossing every day. And it’s taking these daily tasks that we sometimes see as a chore and it’s, in a sense, elevated them.

If I look at them as something that I’m doing as self-care and something that I can do as taking care of myself, they become really positive and joyous things to integrate in daily life and they don’t become a chore anymore.

And looking at self-care is also the nice things, such as the day spa, getting your nails done, but it’s just the daily small rituals that you can do for yourself that might be annoying at the time, but future Adriana is going to thank you for having clean sheets on the bed.

MD: Yeah, exactly. I think you’re rendering the ordinary extraordinary, one would say. But I think that’s really powerful. There are so many things that we might see as tedious habits. For me, it was exercise. Really switching the motivator and making it about feeling good, not about something to do to maintain something.

AP: Or something that you have to do to achieve something. I suppose going back to what things have I switched, it’s been more about really small daily habitual changes to try and make a greater change in my life. So keeping small daily promises to myself, so I’ve been journaling every morning, which I’ve found really powerful and really helpful.

MD: Is it stream of consciousness sort of journaling?

AP: No, it’s a prompted one that I do. There’s this really great Instagram account that I follow called The Holistic Psychologist, and this journaling prompting that I’m doing every morning is called The Future Self Journal and it’s about looking at your daily patterns of behaviour, or your patterns of behaviour in general, and just becoming a little bit more conscious about the emotional reasons behind that and why you do what you do.

It’s been really powerful in changing how I perceive the unconscious patterns that I have in my life.

MD: So if we’re looking at your day then, maybe you could step us through, starting from the morning. Are you someone who gets up at the same time? You were getting up at six, have you now changed that?

AP: I do get up at the same time. It’s changing around at the moment because I’ve started falling in love with yoga again, so I’ve been doing a lot of yoga, which is really lovely. So I generally get up around 7:30, 8.

MD: Just naturally or do you have an alarm?

AP: No, I wake up myself and I’ll sit in bed and do the journaling for ten minutes.

MD: Oh, nice. So you just prop yourself up?

AP: Yeah.

MD: That’s lovely.

AP: And then you have to reward yourself a little bit, so I have daily journaling in my calendar and then I can tick that off and I’ve done the first thing for the day.

MD: That really sets up some momentum. Like, oh, look at me go. I’m keeping promises to myself.

AP: Keeping promises and making sure that every day I make my bed. And that makes me feel good about myself, like I’ve done that first task for the day.

MD: And it’s a lovely reward when you come home as well.

AP: Exactly. And I’m a visual person, so having everything look nice is helpful. I started making my breakfast for myself each morning, which I hadn’t been.

MD: What kind of breakfast will you have?

AP: I’ve gone full 70-year-old nana style and I’m having oats at the moment.

MD: Ooh, what are we putting in the oats?

AP: I make stewed apples and put that in there.

MD: Ooh, lovely.

AP: And then I’ll either go to yoga or I’ll get on a city bike and ride down to the wing here in Dumbo.

MD: So you’ll get here around nine or ten?

AP: About nine, yeah. Have my first cup of coffee here and then sit down and probably dick around on Instagram for about half an hour.

MD: You’ve got to give yourself that time. Faff time.

AP: Yeah, the faff time. And then I’ll feel guilty for dicking around for half an hour and then I’ll probably get stuck into some emails or write a list of what I have to do for the day. I really try and keep to inbox zero, so I don’t have to look at things.

MD: So what’s your system there? Will you respond to everything then and there, or do you catalogue?

AP: I try to respond to everything that is pertinent, and if it’s not pertinent then I’ll stick it in a folder called ‘To-Do’, which is where emails go to die.

MD: Oh no. I’m so glad that this podcast request didn’t end up in that to-do.

AP: Yeah, it’s like a task reminder system.

MD: I heard that this email assistant was saying that if something is more than a month old, just let go.

AP: Forget about it.

MD: Let it go. If it’s important, they’ll follow up.

AP: I don’t know that I can do that. 

MD: It just sort of weighs on the unconscious mind maybe.

AP: It definitely does.

MD: Although it’s away.

AP: I find that if I put it in the folder, it doesn’t weigh on the mind anymore.

MD: Right, there we go. A solution. Solved. So it might take a while then, for emails in the morning?

AP: It depends on my mood, really. Sometimes I’ll leave half of them to the rest of the day. I’m not great with emails, to be honest. I’d much rather just get stuck into whatever deadlines I have for the day.

MD: So how many projects will you be working on?

AP: Concurrently?

MD: Yeah, now that there’s not the big one.

AP: At the moment, I’ve got three to four on the boil.

MD: And is that a nice amount? Not too overwhelming?

AP: It depends on how big they are, but generally, apart from the book stuff, it’s all manageable.

MD: What kind of projects are your favourites? Maybe you don’t want to talk about what you do.

AP: No, I mean, I’m in a really lovely point in my career where I’m getting commissioned for the exact style that I do because I have such a body of work now that people can go and pick and select from what they want.

In the beginning of your career, I find that people come to you and they offer perhaps inspiration images from other illustrators or other sources and be like, can you do this style? Or this subject matter, or something that’s a bit off-kilter from what you’re actually doing.

But at the moment, I’m at a place in my career where I’m really getting commissioned for exactly the type of work that I love doing. I’ve done cookbooks. For a long time I did a column for Australian Gourmet Traveller, which was all about produce. So there is a very big correlation between botanical illustration and food illustration, and food is something that I’m really passionate about and love drawing.

I think, particularly in this city, food is a really nice way of connecting me back to nature. I love going to the farmer’s markets and looking at produce and it is still the connection, a really tangible connection, to nature.

MD: Yeah, exactly. So how will you get into a brief then? Do you find it quite easy to switch from emails into actual creative work?

AP: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depending on where I am in the day, my mood. A lot of the time, I like working from a coworking space because it does allow me some social interaction, but that does impact upon creative thinking. It really does. But we’re human beings, we’re social creatures. We need social interaction.

So it just takes me a minute to switch out of that and get back into creative thinking, but I do have a pretty set process of how I approach a creative brief now and that starts off with looking for inspiration images, and that allows my mind to switch over from day-to-day Adriana brain to a creative brain. It’s a bit of a switch.

MD: Yeah, it’s like a warm-up.

AP: Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch. A gentle stretch is starting to look at these images and the mind then makes connections of where I want to go with composition or colour, and it sort of starts flowing from there.

A lot of projects I have, I’ll look on the internet for imagery, but I also have, particularly if it’s a botanical project, I have such a backlog, like a personal reference library of images that if I see a flower that I like, I’ll just take a photo of it and then file that away for future use, and so I’d probably start there as well. I’d go through all my photos looking for imagery that I’d like to use.

MD: Yeah, and do you use Procreate? 

AP: Yes, so I work pretty much exclusively digitally now, unless I’m doing a mural or an exhibition of paintings, so I will collect the reference imagery, think about how many motifs I need, have a think about composition, and then I’ll start drawing on Procreate on my iPad.

We’re at a really incredible age for illustration and digital illustration because we have all these tools at our fingertips, and I’m literally drawing on my iPad. It’s like final art for huge scales. For everything. It’s just wild and exciting.

MD: What does the late afternoon, the evening look like? When do you put a stop to your day?

AP: That really does vary on if I’ve met my deadline.

MD: Right, yes.

AP: So sometimes that could go a little bit later. So generally I tend to work here at the coworking space until about six or seven, and then if I need to continue on working, I much prefer to do it at home and have a little bit of a break, cook some dinner, and then I like to draw from bed if I have to do it later into the night. It’s just a bit more snuggly and nice.

MD: And what if you don’t have to keep working?

AP: You know, finish and go have dinner with friends.

MD: Do you like having alone time?

AP: I do really enjoy alone time, and I think that’s one of the reasons that makes me successful at this career. I think about June, I didn’t see anybody other than my parents, but I really do enjoy alone time. I find the work that I do really satisfying and really fulfilling, so spending time alone doing that certainly isn’t a chore. Drawing, for me, is meditative and, at the best of times when I’m enjoying it too much, is restorative. And a beautiful thing.

MD: Do you find it easy to wind down?

AP: Now that I think about it, one of the great ways that I divide my day is cooking dinner for myself. I really love cooking. It’s another creative outlet for me, and the simple act of preparing food for yourself is really nourishing and wonderful, and that really meditative process of chopping a vegetables becomes a moment of stillness in my day and where I move from professional Adriana into personal Adriana. Even though I’m not great at separating the two in terms of I bring work home, but I think this act of cooking for myself is a really nice moment of calm and nourishment. And, again, self-care.

MD: So your evenings are quite full then. What time would you usually try to get to bed?

AP: It really does depend. I used to be such an avid reader and that kind of stopped a couple of years ago, actually, when I started freelancing. I started using my reading time before I went to sleep to keep drawing. So I got out of the habit of reading, and I’m trying to get back into reading, but generally, if I’m tired, I’ll probably watch a movie or something. Bedtime is from between 10 till midnight.

MD: And you’ll just wake up naturally, and rinse and repeat.

AP: Exactly. Rinse and repeat. Hopefully with a little bit of variation in there.

MD: I’ve certainly learned a lot from Adriana about embracing the season you’re in, about how it’s okay for a dream project to be hard, about rest, and about returning to basics, and I really hope that you have too.

You can follow Adriana’s work on Instagram @AdrianaPicker. That’s with one ‘N’. and her new book Petal will be released in Australia on April 1st and in the US on April 20th, and it’s now available for pre-order so I’ll be sure to pop that in the show notes for you too.

To finish our conversation, I asked Adriana to share one small thing that has made a difference to her days.

AP: One thing that I’ve been trying to do very consciously is looking at what media I consume on a daily basis. So before post- crazy book hell burn out deadline period, I had this habit where I’d walk or bike ride to work and I’d listen to the Daily, that really great podcast, every morning.

And I realised that that was becoming quite a negative thing for me. It was starting my day off listening to, basically, half an hour about Trumps impeachment.

MD: Yes, important things, but not for starting the day.

AP: Very important things, but yes. So now I’m really actively trying to consume positive media, positive podcasts.

MD: Any favourites?

AP: I’ve been going a little bit self-help style. I’ve been listening to lots of Oprah’s podcasts.

MD: Wonderful Sunday?

AP: Yeah, something like that. And she just has some really inspiring people on. So listening to positive podcasts. If I watch a movie, I’d like to try and make it positive at the moment. And it’s just that little switch in your brain, and just trying to be aware of the media you’re consuming and the impact that has upon your mood.

MD: Like many Australians, and I’m sure many others across the globe, I’ve been falling into media spirals. Stifled and horrified by the bush fire disaster we’re fighting. There are so many people that are stranded, facing loss and uncertainty. So many pieces of advice being ignored.

And there hasn’t been any decisive or empathetic leadership. There will be a lot to rebuild and a lot to change and, touching on what Adriana said, it can be really stifling to see so much tragedy in the news and I think, while it’s really important to be informed, it’s equally important to keep moving rather than be stifled.

So if, in order to do what you can, in order to cultivate compassion or sympathy, or to take action in the small or big ways that you can, or that are accessible to you, if you need to switch off the news or change your media consumption or put containers around it in your day, then that, to me, is a form of self-care.

It goes back to that idea of fostering, trusting, and protecting. While it can feel trivial to be working on creative work while the world is suffering, we actually need big hearts. We need new ways of thinking. We need openness to change and ways of sharing messages that resonate and stories that can have a ripple of change, big or small.

We can donate, create, have determination for change and compassion, and creativity actually inspires people to do that rather than inspiring feelings of guilt or shame. It can make people feel empowered.

So I want to step into that feeling, rather than away from it. And I think that’s what can connect us, I hope.