Steph Balloqui’s Profile Student Toggle navigation

Graphic Design, Illustration

Hello! My name is Steph Balloqui. I’m a 23 year old COMD student at City Tech and a freelance visual artist. I like film, vampires, and going to museums and shows. I draw, paint, edit, and digitally altar eccentric art for those people who love oddity and horror just a little too much (like me)!

I grew up surrounded by art. My dad spent the late 70s and early 80s working for artists such as Louise Nevelson and Andy Warhol, and I loved hearing stories about how their creative process worked- so it wasn’t surprising when I started drawing at four years old. I was in the art program in high school but focused more on performance art and art history, and never expected to pursue a career in art, originally attending mortuary school. I picked up art as a possible serious career after having to leave mortuary school for health reasons, and spent all my free time falling in love with design.

My art is a combination of abstract expressionism and surrealism, with hypnagogic influences, and I style my art after how messy and chaotic children can draw. I create art that’s meant to look uncomfortable and off-putting while also containing heavy tones of black humor. My biggest artistic influences are Jhonen Vasquez, Andy Warhol, Stephen Gammell, Gerald Scarfe, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

I aspire to become a freelance designer/illustrator one day, and to incorporate dark themes, uncomfortable truths of life, and black humor into advertisements, editorials, illustrations, political cartoons, and other examples of everyday design.