Creativity is within all of us.

Four years ago, Octavia Bromell, a music and journalism student in London, abruptly left school because of clinical anxiety and depression. She moved back to her hometown in the English countryside. “I couldn’t work or do anything,” she says.

The period that followed proved incredibly challenging for Octavia. That’s when she met her soon-to-be mentor, Alex Lacey, an artist who encouraged Octavia to find her creative voice and inspired her to begin drawing.

“Alex valued the act of making things. I could sit down and spend four hours drawing and that would have a lot of worth to her,” Octavia says. “Illustration became very addictive very quickly. For so long I had that absence of joy. Illustrating stuck and it became all absorbing.” 

Driven by a boundless imagination and a budding passion for illustration, Octavia eventually applied and was selected for the Adobe Creative Residency program, where she had the opportunity to focus on design full-time.

Octavia now has her own studio called Tink Outside the Box and creates work about mental health, self-esteem and what it means to be a human in 2020. It all has a simple thread running through it: Find joy in the everyday.