Portraits from the Blue Desert by Laprisamata | MakersPlace Blog

Invocation rituals, deserts, tribal fights, and a lot of magic are what we can find in this new series. A work set in the Desert of the Blue Men, where the Yellow Priestesses of each region invoke mythical titans.

The Blue Desert is the future home of the Iberians, a dried-up ancient sea where the people worship black cats and a three-eyed skull. This surrealist fantasy land is the brainchild of Luis Toledo, aka Laprisamata, a graphic artist based in Madrid, Spain, who has developed his unique Blue Desert mythology through artwork, hand-drawn maps, short stories, histories, and more.

This epic project will culminate in a full-scale exhibition, a VR Blue Desert experience, a graphic novel, and animated short films. Before that, though, for his first MakersPlace drop, Laprisamata brings an offering of three sacred portraits, part of The Blue Desert Rituals Series.

From a young age, Luis Toledo studied reality to pull hidden meanings from everyday images, dissecting the mystery of beauty. As a meticulous artistic magpie, Toledo gathered illustrations, textures, and fragments from which he would build his images. Tangled, powerful, and ethereal, each work accumulates meanings on microscopic levels.

Toledo’s favored discipline has become digital collage, which affords limitless freedoms in assembling each atom of color to create a vast universe within a finite image.

Thanks to his particular graphic style, Laprisamata has developed projects for companies such as Warner Music, Atlantic Records, EA Games, and Y&R and is currently represented by award-winning agency Dutch Uncle. He’s been internationally recognized with the Wacom Awards, Awards Pantone, and Behance National Design Awards. His work has also been published in prestigious magazines like Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, Computer Arts, Digital Arts, DPI, El País, and Kult Magazine.

Toledo’s artwork has been exhibited in NYC, Berlin, Denver, Amsterdam, Madrid, Singapore, Portugal, and Chicago. His design works have also illustrated the music of bands like Weezer, Gary Clark Jr., Antemasque (members of The Mars Volta and Red Hot Chili Peppers), Big Wild, Residente, and Caravan Palace, as well as the first novel by Pete Townshend of The Who.