Name: Stephanie Cheng

Handle: @iamstephcheng

Before you kick a few bucks into your office Oscar pool, follow Stephanie Cheng on Instagram. The Toronto artist is illustrating her Oscar picks, and last week she began a new series inspired by this year's Best Picture nominees, re-imagining movie posters for Moonlight, Hidden Figures and La La Land so far.

Stephanie Cheng's poster for La La Land. It's not her pick for Best Picture, but the movie "re-ignited" her love of film. (Courtesy of the Artist)

"I definitely like to dabble in pop culture stuff," Cheng says, and no one is safe from her squeegee. Kanye, Drake, Ghostface — she's made prints (and in some cases pins) of them all.

​"A friend said I make 'real-life memes,'" says Cheng. "Meme art, but tangible. You can hold it."

She laughs off the comment, but it's not wrong. Instead of making reaction GIFs, she screenprints.

"I think it's just fascinating," she says, talking about pop culture. "It's so strange what we as a culture latch onto or what we find interesting — the whole notion of celebrity."

And yet, for all the pop stars and sports stars that she's illustrated, she'd never done a series about the movies. That's because, Cheng explains, she hadn't gone to a theatre in years, happy enough to chill at home with Netflix (and avoid paying $20+ for a night at the megaplex).

Then, a friend asked her out to La La Land.

"I kind of forgot just how magical it is to see things on the really big screen," she says — and the film's colour and music "re-inspired" her to get back into movies.

I kind of forgot just how magical it is to see things on the really big screen. - Stephanie Cheng, artist

"I just dove into it," she says. After seeing Moonlight and Hidden Figures, "it kind of re-ignited my love for watching film."

"I'm always just making art," says Cheng. As a result, there was almost no way she wouldn't inevitably start making movie posters. She started sketching after watching the films.

Kanye West's an artist, bro. So is Stephanie Cheng. (www.stephaniecheng.ca)

Raised in Montreal, where she studied art and graphic design at Concordia University, Cheng, 35, has focused on screenprinting since moving to Toronto. She's worked out of Kid Icarus, an independent paper shop/print studio in Kensington Market, for the last five years.

(Prints of the movie posters can be found through her own online shop, and at the upcoming Toronto One of a Kind Show, March 29 – April 2.)

The first three movie illustrations have more in common than being frontrunners for Best Picture, Cheng explains. "Those films in particular, I felt like they all had a similar theme in terms of dreaming," she says. In Moonlight, the dream is love; in La La Land, it's showbiz success; in Hidden Figures, it's equal rights. For the posters, Cheng links the movie "dreamers" through a shared, twinkling backdrop of stars.

On Sunday, the artist says she'll be cheering for Moonlight to win — though she expects La La Land will ultimately take the Oscar.

In the meantime, there are more movies to see — because, she explains, she needs to watch them before she draws them.

Take a look at some of her work.

Find more of Stephanie Cheng's art on her website.

Social media can be so much more than selfies and viral videos — it's increasingly becoming a scratch pad for emerging artists and other creative minds to show off their latest work. Artstagram curates the best visual talent on Instagram, helping bring a little more art into your daily feed.​