It’s May 20, 2024, and Phoebe Kut is just putting the finishing touches to her illustration of the new Alien Hypersense luxury perfume from Mugler. This is one of the most detailed pieces she has ever worked on, and she loves the purple and orange color scheme. It’s a lot of fun to draw, but also a lot of work.
She’s been working on it daily for the past few days, and she’s just completed it and sent it to her client. She sits back and relaxes and takes in the world. Half an hour later, her phone email alert goes off, and she rushes to see what it says.
The email has only three words. It says “THIS IS AWESOME”, and Phoebe feels an overwhelming sense of triumph and fulfillment and happiness. She’s only been a full time interior designer and illustrator for two years, but she’s already built up a strong online presence and is known worldwide for different kinds of artistic creations, including short videos that are beautifully made, educational, and entertaining, which include little illustrations of chairs and other interior design objects. With more than 120,000 followers on Instagram and almost 200,000 followers on TikTok, she is an accomplished content creator.
Phoebe’s Creative Journey
Even when Phoebe was very young, she always gravitated towards creative things. She took art classes, participated in dance class, and even learned Chinese watercolor painting. In her 20s, she dabbled in photography and learned the basics of UI design. But when the time came to go to university, she chose a STEM major, and studied Cell and Molecular Biology. For a few years, she did no creative work.
In October 2020, she had an epiphany that was to change her life.
Phoebe had her aha moment in the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, one of the most scenic locations in China. She was driving across a bridge, and she was transfixed by the combination of architectural and natural beauty. And when her friend asked her what she loved, she realized that good design and aesthetics were central to her enjoyment of her personal and professional world.
Phoebe lost no time in chasing the dream that she had suddenly realized was fundamental to her. She decided to go back to school to study interior design.
Her next move required courage – after all, she was contemplating a big career change, and she was already doing well, so it was definitely a risk. Phoebe decided to enroll in the Interior Design program at BCIT in Vancouver, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of her life. There were several foundational courses and great learning opportunities. Over the course of her program studying interior design, Phoebe saw that all her classmates were talented, and often thought about how to differentiate her own skills and design work.
A class on rendering by hand gave her an idea, and her final project was widely appreciated for how well rendered it was, among other things. Soon after, she was on TikTok, and made her “How to Render Concrete” video, which was the beginning of her viral social media success. But the fundamentals were always sound; Phoebe remembers trying to find videos teaching marker technique on YouTube with little success, and so her unique content was always going to take off. Over the months and years since her social media blitz in 2022, she has added several recognizable touches to her brand online; she is now known as much for her illustration process videos of chairs as she is for her short educational interior design videos and helpful tips.
In her current career, Phoebe has found that a lot of the skills she learned earlier have held her in good stead, even ones she wasn’t sure she’d need again. For example, from her stint in a sales job, she picked up negotiation skills that have helped her handle contract discussions well, and she’s not shy to ask for the number she deserves when dealing with a huge corporate client. She’s also always been a self-starter and good at time management, and that’s helped her manage her two massively successful social media pages alongside her life and work. Speaking of social media, her perseverance helped; from time to time, as her engagement goes through ebb and flow states, she’s had the self-belief to keep going. She’s also been able to use her business development skills to good effect; when she sees a brand she really likes, she reaches out to work with them by messaging them on Instagram; she agrees with the old maxim of missing 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Illustration Spotlight: Bibendum Chair
Phoebe’s illustration of the Bibendum chair elegantly captures the essence of Eileen Gray’s iconic design while adding her unique artistic flair.
Using a palette of blue hues, Phoebe masterfully employs shading to create a three-dimensional effect that brings the chair to life on paper. This technique highlights the chair’s voluptuous curves, making it appear plush and inviting.
Her choice of a blank white background is particularly striking. It isolates the chair, allowing viewers to appreciate its form without the distraction of a busy room, emphasizing its design purity. The simplification of certain details, like the exaggerated rounded edges, distills the chair’s essence into a more accessible and visually appealing form.
Phoebe’s personal touch is evident in small details, such as her distinctive handwriting, which adds personality to the piece. The comments on her work often praise her ability to transform everyday furniture into captivating art, highlighting the beauty in simplicity, and her soothing narration.
Process
When Phoebe creates one of her illustrations for social media, there are usually three main steps in the process:
1. Color Matching: Phoebe takes real world objects and transfers them to two dimensional paper using alcohol-based markers. The color palette is central to this process, and Phoebe always spends time choosing the primary color scheme, its hues, and its shades.
2. Test Draws: Phoebe spends a couple of days making draft sketches of her chosen subject till she is satisfied that she has captured the soul of the object, and created a unique aesthetic that is close to the real world item, but also one that is in her very own art style.
3. Final draw and recording: The final illustration is recorded for social media, and always ends up as a beautifully shaded and sketched art piece with its title written below in Phoebe’s unique handwriting. She also applies innovatively chosen finishing touches to make the piece feel alive, like bronzer in the case of “Velvet”. A full final illustration can take up to three hours to complete and record.
As of June 2024, Phoebe uses Copic, DeSerres, and Ohuhu markers, along with Prismacolor and Faber-Castell pencil crayons.
She often looks back on her early influences. For example, in her earliest art classes, she focused on drawing people and faces, rather than objects. She did a lot of pencil sketches with ballpoint pen, and this precision has helped her invest her latest illustrations with life and personality and precision. When she looks at a chair in real life and decides to create an art piece based on the chair, she spends a lot of time testing different colors, identifying the darks and lights, and recognizing that the small details make all the difference – the beauty is really in the last 10% of the creation phase.
Illustration Collaborations
In addition to her interior design work and illustrations of chairs, Phoebe has also collaborated with multiple brands. Her illustrations have helped launch new products and strengthen new campaigns for Samsung, Starbucks, Cadillac Canada, Daniel Wellington, Axel Arigato, Pull&Bear, and Mugler. Perhaps her most high profile work was showcased during a Super Bowl ad campaign for PepsiCo’s new chip brand, Havoc – her hands can actually be seen in the commercial!
Interior Design Work
When Phoebe works to transform interior spaces into visions of beauty and organized wonder, she always brings a systematic approach to her work. Even though, to the external observer who sees only the Before and After pictures, interior design might seem like a purely artistic project, Phoebe knows that a lot of the work isn’t as glamorous. The core skill is to communicate with her clients and make sure that they’re getting what they want, and there’s a lot of back-and-forth where she gives them options that are functional and that work within their budgets. She is happy, however, that the end result is aesthetically pleasing, and that she always manages to achieve a happy medium balancing client considerations, her own artistic recommendations, and budget constraints.
She is also adept at creative ideas for interior accessories. A lot of her success with the DIY work ethic comes down to how she was raised, always conscious of wasting nothing and mindful of budgets. She enjoys the challenge of making sure that her clients always get the best, and this attitude is seen in her illustrations as well; she uses alcohol markers on thin printer paper, and she doesn’t even own an iPad. She encourages people to use what they have, and elevate their interiors through creativity.
Social Media Success
Phoebe is fascinated by how social media platforms, particularly TikTok and Instagram, can serve as sources of information. An aspiring interior designer can look at her videos and learn about her process, while also having their questions answered about a day in her life and the kind of work she does, and this democratizes knowledge and helps people make important career decisions.
Phoebe’s TikTok and Instagram pages are known today for her tasteful illustrations, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks at exciting design projects, and “how to” videos. Her social media success actually snowballed from the last of those things. In mid-2022, after a college class, she put up a short video on TikTok called “how to quick render concrete”, a fifteen second tutorial. The texture tutorial went viral, and many more followed. In less than a quarter of a year, her TikTok audience had grown by 1900%. The same videos were a hit on Instagram as well, alongside her wildly popular marker sketches primarily of various items of furniture (largely chairs), but also of many other aesthetically pleasing items, from sneakers to perfume!
One of the things that’s most special about Phoebe’s videos is that they’re educational without ever seeming like they’re trying to be educational. Even when they’re only 30 seconds long, you get to learn something about the history of interior design, all while being soothed by the ASMR audio of markers on paper and Phoebe’s narrative voice, and entertained by the strong production values and scripting.
Phoebe has always had a thing for content creation. Even in elementary school, she made videos with her friends, and honed her skills by taking a film class. She also had practical experience of making YouTube videos, so it was a craft that she worked long and hard to perfect – from storytelling to shooting and editing. It all came together with her videos for social media, and they are unique in that they’re often just fifteen seconds long, even though they convey a lot of crucial information.
Finally, Phoebe makes it a point not to let social media consume her life; she makes sure that notifications are switched off, and only spends time on TikTok and Instagram at the end of the day to research trends and reply to messages, and never during the day. Through this simple rule, she is able to focus her time and energy towards real-world activities, work, and people when needed.
The Future is Bright
Phoebe still can’t find the words to describe how good it feels when aspiring interior designers and illustrators send her messages asking for advice – about getting into the right school, building their own brands, or just telling her that she’s inspiring to them. Another huge recent triumph was when a close childhood friend trusted her enough to ask her to design a nursery.
In addition to her friends and family, Phoebe is also grateful for her time at BCIT. She specifically remembers her History of Furniture course as being transformative; she didn’t think that she was into history before that, but she remembers his enthusiasm as being infectious. Her art teacher from elementary school was also instrumental in guiding her first few steps in the world of art, and she is thankful to all those close friends who supported her at every step.
Phoebe is excited about what the future holds. In just two years, she has come further than she thought she would when she had her creative epiphany; she looks forward to starting her own firm, working with brands she loves, and further increasing her reach through a TV show. For now, she loves how she can bring together all her skills as a creative, content creator, illustrator, and interior designer.
Links
Phoebe’s Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/pbjdesign_/.
Phoebe’s TikTok page: https://www.tiktok.com/@pbjdesign.
Etsy page: https://etsy.com/ca/shop/pbjdesignshop.