How Kaitlin Brito Protects Her Pure Making So The Paid Work Gets Better

Creative Boom: Inspiration Illustration How Kaitlin Brito protects her 'pure making' so the paid work gets better The New Jersey illustrator on hitting the burnout wall, drawing with a black ink pen so she can't turn back, and finding the magic in everyday things like beans and thrifted trinkets. Written By: Katy Cowan 1 July 2026 Kaitlin Brito makes, in her own words, images with a "sparkle": careful linework, bright flat colour and a playful sense of nostalgia that keeps finding the whimsy in the mundane.

A Peruvian-American illustrator based in New Jersey and a School of Visual Arts graduate, she has been named a Society of Illustrators winner and drawn for the likes of Google, Disney, Pinterest, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR. Beneath the warmth, though, is a working life she has had to learn to protect. It started the day she got a bit stuck. "Hitting that wall looked like me sitting at my desk, two days gone by without going outside, a blank canvas open on my screen, and just staring for long minutes," she tells Creative Boom.

"It was an absolute emptiness in my brain, and honestly a pretty scary feeling, the feeling of having nothing more to give." It was a tough stretch. She had to push on and clear deadlines before she could take any time to reflect and work through it. What came out the other side was a rule she now guards closely: prioritise "pure making", even when it eats into the time set aside for paid work. "If I have an idea for something, or just want to draw my breakfast one morning, I do it," she says.

"I don't ignore the call to create, because I find it helps me do my paid work later, by sort of rewiring my mind to not have a separation between what's a job and what is me just drawing." Said plainly now, she admits, it sounds obvious. "It feels like a 'well, duh!' moment. But when you're completely consumed by paid work, the unopened emails and the red deadlines filling your calendar, it's easy to forget that you also do this thing for fun." Sometimes the deadline genuinely is at noon, and the making has to wait. More often than not, she says, you need to give yourself a bit of time anyway.

These days, she sets timers to intentionally carve out space. The pen that won't let her turn back Ask Kaitlin about her favourite tool, and she'll point to a black ink pen, precisely because it forces her to go for it with no turning back. For a self-described overthinker and perfectionist, you might expect that to feel limiting. She sees it the other way round. "I've never really considered limiting myself to that one medium as a constraint," she says. "It's more like a key to unlocking a freer part of my brain. I'm often overwhelmed by choice, and on top of being an over-thinker, I'm a perfectionist at heart.

If I give myself a pencil, I'll redraw and erase something a million times to make it look 'good', until I finish and I hate it, because it came from a place of trying too hard to be something I'm not." That instinct for line goes right back. The combination of line art and flat, bright colour clicked into place in her final year at university, and she never looked back, but the seeds were there much earlier. "Drawing was always my absolute favourite thing to do. Even when I was very young, my paintings were outlines of things, rarely filling in the shapes," she says.

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The article discusses a unique approach to balancing personal creativity with professional work, which is relevant and actionable for brand strategy professionals, though it may not have widespread industry implications.