“What I do is probably too much,” Pomme Chan laughs. “Most people don’t need to do all this and could just pick one or two things to do.” And it’s true, she really does a lot. She’s an illustrator, designer, fine artist, and more. She runs an illustration studio, a custom interior design firm, and has a retail shop full of her own products. Pomme is resolutely seeking out exactly what she wants from life, and she’s always asking herself what that is. It just so happens that she wants a lot.
Pomme (whose real name is Tachamapan Chanchamrassang) got a late start down the creative path. She’s tried out many different things, learning through trial and error what she enjoys and, more specifically, what she doesn’t: “I was always trying to figure out what’s not for me, and then I can subtract that to make what I do want more clear.” As a kid, she was actually very much into math until she failed a mathematics Olympic exam when she was 14. That was when she made a big pivot towards an artistic life. “I was looking for something where I never had to do math again.” She graduated from interior design at 20 but that wasn’t quite it. She took some web design classes and that wasn’t exactly it either. She went to London and studied graphic design and did some advertising internships, and that was closer.
Eventually, Pomme applied all of these lessons and cobbled together a lifestyle that suited her. But she works hard to make sure she never gets boxed in. One hurdle that she’s come up against as an illustrator is that people often expect her to keep doing the same thing. “I still have clients asking me to do the style I came up with when I started doing this 20 years ago,” she explains. “But people change. We’re not the same person we were last year or the year before. Why should our work stay the same?” While she understands the realities of all this—clients know what to expect of you when you have an identifiable style and it makes it easier to find when looking for something particular—she makes an effort to avoid it. “If we explain this to our clients, bit by bit we can change what they expect of us. I constantly update my portfolio. And I delete super old work, because it’s not who I am anymore.”
She also makes space to cultivate purely creative urges as well. “When I’m doing abstract work, I do about one or two series per year. I need to really feel something and think about it and only do it when I’m truly inspired. Then I block out the time to do it,” she explains. “I never force myself to do fine art. My commercial work and illustrations I force sometimes but not the fine art. I want to make sure it’s organic.”
In 2022, Pomme held a personal retrospective looking back on her 20-year career, collecting old works and creating new ones. “I was looking through a memory box, and in there was a piece of paper with my goals and this was one of them,” she says. But it was also a result of her personal growth and evolution—that constant theme in her life again. “Something inside me was changing and I wanted to do more fine art, I just didn’t know what yet.” The result was a collection of new mediums, old work, and collaborative projects. There were rugs, prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures. A bit of everything, which truly speaks to her personality.
It takes a lot of work to balance all these projects. “I’m very good at time management,” Pomme laughs. “Like down to the minute.” She also goes to sleep very early, and in the morning practices meditation and does yoga every day. “I live a very structured life.” But of course, having a team helps a lot as well. “One thing I’m terrible at is getting back to people. My team has total access to my phone, I have no secrets from them.”
In the end, Pomme has found herself exactly where she wants to be, and you can see the satisfaction in her output: her illustration house is called Happy People Studio, and their only rule is to make work that is “100 percent not sad.” “I want to spread joy. Sometimes it’s that simple, just spreading kindness. You don’t always need complexity, the world is already complicated enough.”
