She makes art of the grotesque and her followers eat it up

Wearing a blue-and-purple tie-dye crop top that exposes her hot-pink bra paired with rolled-up jeans shorts and massive platform work boots, Anhia Santana doesn't seem . . . well, even as young as she is, she doesn't like to reveal her age.

"I feel like it ruins my brand," said Santana, better known as the visual artist Distortedd.

Her "brand" is a collection of captivatingly grotesque illustrations and animations with psychedelic swirls, gross-out oozes, and bouncing body parts that she admits sometimes scare people away.

Hip-hop magazine Complex called it "trippy meets trap." Santana calls it "Sickkkkk with, like, five k's." And even though her artistic style is less universal than her inspirations, Frida Kahlo and Lisa Frank, Santana has built up an impressive following of mainstream music acts like rapper Action Bronson, singer Erykah Badu, and off-the-wall "U Guessed It" hitmaker OG Maco.

Crazier than her dark, twisted-yet-feminine fantasy artwork is the fact that so much has happened in such a short time. Art has taken Santana, a self-proclaimed 'hood girl from Reading, around the country to star in exhibits, most recently in Miami, D.C., and New York, and to brush shoulders with rap performers such as OJ the Juice Man and Trinidad James. She hopes one day to run her own creative company.

For now, she splits her time between creating her own art and working at G.W. Childs Elementary School in South Philly with children who have ADHD and other disorders, which gives her a chance to use her degree in psychology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Her budding career began to take life about four years ago after she moved to Philly, when she and boyfriend Marc Murphy started a clothing brand called Bombardment, popular among the local skateboard community. She used to work in the background and design for the company, but the "miniature rock star" wasn't feeling the setup.

"I don't like to be a ghost designer," she says. "I like people to know I make the art."

Santana stuck with the boyfriend but broke away from designing for Bombardment and got serious about creating her own work.

Much of her calling comes from her roots. Santana remembers her Dominican mom always making things around the house, like traditional fabric flower arrangements. When her dad got locked up for 10 years for selling drugs, the pair would trade artwork back and forth and he'd often critique her pieces. "He was my inspiration," Santana says of her father, who now lives in the Dominican Republic.

But two of her brothers really influenced her style.

"Growing up, I was always around my brothers," says Santana, one of eight children. "And one of them really liked hip-hop and then the other one really liked rock - he's real psychedelic and just a trippy dude. I got a mixture of both of them."

Santana's Distortedd darkness comes from her experiences in the 'hood and her musical influences, but also from her personality. She's a self-described weird geek who became frozen in time after middle school. "I was an outcast with no friends," Santana says of her adolescence.

One piece called "Purgatory" embodies the multidimensional illustrator. In the piece, a girl's face (which looks eerily like it could be a self-portrait) is being split in half by a one-eyed angel and a one-eyed demon. "I'm really a good person, giving and stuff like that," Santana says, "but I have another side that's not so nice, not so peaceful." Underneath the mask of the peeling, two-eyed face is a woman with octopus hair and a single leaking eyeball, a stylistic trademark that Santana says represents her vision.

"It's connected a lot to the third-eye thing, too," she says, referring to the Hindu idea of a chakra located on the forehead between the eyes that provides energy for esoteric spiritual insight. "I think people with a third eye just perceive things in a different way. And I feel like I don't see the world like everybody else does."

Maybe she was once an outsider, but now "cool" describes everything about Santana's aesthetic, from her soft, disarming voice to her cutoff clothes to her 20 or so tattoos (one is a heart on her face) to the signature prayer hands she makes in her photos ("It means I'm blessed," she half-jokes).

Santana markets her work mostly through social media, selling pieces on her website, distortedd.com, for $30 to several hundred dollars. Her more than 11,000 Instagram followers and 11,000 Twitter followers affirm that Santana's finally found her community, which ranges from white, hippie stoners to 'hood, trap-music enthusiasts. She's a party girl. But her workspace in her West Philly townhouse apartment has a relaxing, tidy look.

The walls in the modest-size room are a surprisingly soothing orange-peach. In the far corner, a white quilted leather futon is laid flat into a bed "because it makes me feel more comfortable," Santana says. Outside, the sun and warm breeze create a pleasant day, so she has the room's sole window open. And the neatness of the room almost makes the horizontal and vertical rectangles of bleeding brains, deteriorating animals, and prying grim reapers covering the walls look like they belong there and not necessarily in some underground subcultural art gallery.

"I usually like to be on the floor," says Santana. "I'm usually just here in my underwear laying down." That's the stance she takes before cracking open her MacBook and logging onto the program she uses to create her work. For her still illustrations, the process is fairly simple: She sketches the picture, snaps a photo and uploads it to Adobe Illustrator, and colors it in.

That #FREEGUCCI Gucci Mane animation you may have seen floating around, though, is more about the artistic process in Santana's head than the technical process.

Santana's animations and illustrations, no matter how mind-bending, are what Distortedd is all about, and she's holding fast to that.

"I don't want to dilute my artwork for people. I want to keep it the way it is. Even though it might be creepy, I don't know. It's my personality."