Visualized: Elliott Baker

Sep 6, 2012 by PORTALS

Elliott Baker is a Denver-based artist who makes some of the more out there (in a good way) artwork we’ve ever laid eyes on. He’s best known for his electro-pop group, Cerulean, but we’ve quickly grown to love and appreciate his imagery just as much. Here’s what Elliott had to say about drawing and his “addiction” to creating:

If I had to put my art in a genre I think it would be thrown somewhere in the pop category. I don’t like to categorize it because it is even more personal than my music. With that being said though, I do really enjoy pop, whether it be in music or visually. I didn’t start making “art” until about 3 years ago. I was in college and really not enjoying my life filled with things that didn’t REALLY matter to me. So on a Saturday morning I went down to the local art store and bought my first little canvas and red, yellow, and blue paint. I was instantly addicted to creating. It was around this time that I first started making music as well. I just wanted to surround myself with as many creative people as possible, no matter what their creative niche was. Making these pieces is a new technique that I started about a year ago. I draw each image on a piece of bristol board, generally in A3 format, and after a few hours of creating the more complex images I go over the image with the first round of micron pens. The smaller the better. Then I erase everything, and go over in a thicker micron. Then I use an app called TurboScan to take three pictures of the piece and layer them. After that, I simply input them into Photoshop and color them there. The last step in the process is to blow up the black and white image onto a 3′ x 4′ canvas and use the colors I used in to photoshop as a color pattern on the large painting. The process is quite meditative, but coming up with the actual imagery is not always so easy. Most of the time I just take images from my dreams, where I meet a race of beings called “Dream Transportation Ghosts”. They are pretty much the entire inspiration for these works. Once I meet one of the DTG gods, like Rasputin, Hanuman, Macualy Culkin, or Jazz Hands (all pictured below), I never seen them again. So whenever I wake up, even if it is the middle of the night, I try to at least write down or sketch out the particular god I see before I forget. But when my inspiration is running dry I just think of my ex-girlfriend having sex with her new boyfriend, then I just draw what makes me forget about it.

With that said, enjoy a colorful bundle of Elliott’s ongoing work below: