We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marta Riva a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Marta, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

The biggest risk I took in my life was completely changing the nature of my career. I transitioned from a scientific career to an artistic one.

I have a background as a marine biologist and grew up as a self-taught artist. I hold a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in marine sciences.

After my university years, I decided to take a year off to focus on making art and to recharge after years of intense academic commitment.

A year later, I found myself working as a full-time artist. The freelance life as an artist wasn’t part of my original plan. I never expected to be able to live my dream life based on one of my passions in such a short time!

I gave up an established career in the biology field to take the risk as a freelance illustrator. There were many reasons that eventually led to this choice, but ultimately I just followed my instincts and took the risk.

Perhaps one day I will find a way to combine my passion for art with my scientific background.

Marta, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started working as an illustrator thanks to social media! After my master’s graduation in October 2023, I opened an Instagram profile to share my art for fun, 5 months later, I built a community of 10k people that started to follow my journey. At the time I didn’t know what life was preparing for me. One day I received my first commission request for book designs! The request was for small black and white illustrations to be inserted as chapter headers. I decided to go ahead with it and then I shared my work on my profile . Doing this got me a lot of attention from other authors. With time, I specialized in a dark medieval line art style for book internal designs and illustrations for authors who were aiming for a “vintage” but at the same time modern vibe for their books.

I think that the reason why my designs got so much exposure is that my art style recalls heavily the antique books where all the pages were full of art and decorations; I want my art to bring to life a nostalgic desire of using it not just to showcase colourful characters but to enhance the entire reading experience. It allows readers to have specific visual references as they immerse themselves in the story.

That’s why I always emphasize that my art is perfect for special editions of books!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The most important resource for me was to learn how to extract information from everything. Going through a scientific path, before starting an artistic career was the real deal for me. I learned how to exploit useful information from every single resource. When you learn this, there is no right book or video you need to study. A book that might be beneficial for me may provide little value to someone else, even if it’s packed with knowledge. I believe people often focus more on finding the answers or the knowledge itself rather than appreciating the discovery process behind it.

If you train your mind to recognize knowledge and potential, you won’t have to waste time searching for the “right” resources. Instead, learn how to ask yourself the right questions.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The main wall for me when I started, was to deal with the common social stigma of starting an art career. Deciding to change from a scientific path to a freelance artist career with no background was difficult to explain to the people around me. It was hard for them to grasp that what I’ve worked hard on for many years was not going to be my main source of income or job. Science was still a great passion, but not the right working environment for me. People grow up with the idea that you have to study, graduate and find a job in that specific field. However, no one ever tells you that while a specific career might be suitable for you to learn with passion and interest, it may not be the right fit for your professional life. Explaining to others what were my reasons for this radical shift in life perspective seemed impossible: it was like they were all thinking that I was abandoning a good career for something lesser, as if it was a downgrade. When you excel at something for years, people often expect you to make cohesive life choices that align with your already known skills. This of course leaves no room for other life choice alternatives and sets you on a specific, kind of predeterminated path.

In my case, I chose to listen to my instincts, regardless of what others thought. I think of myself as a scientist just as much as I feel like an artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://intotheforest-illustrations.carrd.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marta.intotheforest/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martariva9/
• Other: Threads: https://www.threads.net/@marta.intotheforest?invite=0