Alexandra Baker is one half of Asheville, NC-based studio DNA Illustrations, specializing in medical graphics for editorial and commercial clients. Along with partner David Baker, she has some "20 years of experience working with images dealing with surgery, anatomy, disease process, patient education and immunology."

Baker's been on track to be a medical illustrator—a highly specialized niche which requires an eye for detail and a steady hand, not unlike medical practitioners themselves—since her undergrad days at UGA, and her work has garnered many accolades over the years.

While her entire body of the work reflects her mastery of realistic illustration, I find that the editorialized graphics in particular demonstrate Baker's unique grasp of biological concepts and her intuition for visual expression of the same. If the compositions are more vivid than in vivo, she successfully transcends graphic clichés with a bit of imagination: it looks like Photoshop's Slice tool inspired the illustration above, and she manages to elevate even the lowly art-school trope of the figure model (below).

Similarly, the illustrations serve as anatomically-accurate yet stylized representations the infinitesimal phenomena of life itself or, conversely, a broader sense of affliction. Even (or perhaps especially) for those of us who have no biological or medical background can appreciate the nominally-embellished beauty of the human body in Baker's illustrations.

Check out her portfolio on Coroflot and DNA Illustrations' website.