A selection of work from Italian artist and illustrator Costanza Starrabba aka Starrenco. Starrenco studied illustration at IED Rome before moving to Milan for her Master’s. While grounded in reality, Starrenco’s work offers a distortion or reinterpretation of select elements, colours and dynamics, resulting in slightly disorienting imaginary worlds. Her images reflect both intentional planning and intuitive traces of thoughts and emotions. For Starrenco, drawings is a method of personal investigation—a narration of one’s inner reality. Her illustrations incorporate her views on femininity, as well as the irony and humour that define our relationships to one another and the world we inhabit.

“When I begin an illustration, I often start from an idea that has been with me for a long time, an image I once saw, a thought, a dream, or a fragment of words that stayed with me. Yet when colour enters the work, something shifts. Small details begin to change, then larger ones. The process is not entirely deliberate: the drawing moves ahead of my intention, guided by a logic I only partly control. Only once the image is finished do I recognise what I had been searching for all along, the drawing has taken on another form, and its meaning becomes visible to me. In this sense, drawing becomes a method of inquiry: a way to investigate what lies beneath the surface of thought, giving shape to an inner landscape that reveals itself only through the act of making.”

Starrenco participated in our 2025 Booooooom Illustration Awards and made our longlist (view all the artists on the longlist).