A woman is cooled down with a watering can as she sunbathes using insulating tape, at a beauty center in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on December 21, 2017. Brazilian women take advantage of the beginning of the summer to sunbathe using the new national trend: natural tanning with insulating tape. Instead of using tiny bikinis on the beach, women avoid being bothered or stalked by getting taped in the shape of them, and lay in the sun over rooftops to enjoy the morning sun and get the perfect “marquinha” tan lines. (Photo by Douglas Magno/AFP Photo)

“The RSPB’s Snettisham Nature Reserve lies on the edge of The Wash, one of the most important bird estuaries in the United Kingdom. The Wash, on England’s east coast, supports over 300,000 birds, and Snettisham sometimes holds more than a third of them”. – The Palm Beach Post. Photo: Waders flock together seeking new feeding grounds during the incoming tide. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images via The Palm Beach Post)

Born in Hanoi, 1979, a member of the Young Painter Association of Vietnam, Trang is an emerging young artist whose mind has been engraved with images of the city and the Northern villages. She brings these vivid memories of the villagers and their life to her paintings. She paints scenes of landscapes in thick textural impasto with bright colours of red, orange, yellow, and blue, making the genre of landscape her own. Her paintings depict her passion to showcase the radiance and freshness of the landscapes in Vietnam. For every stroke of brush reflects her burning desire to bring out a world of complications to simple living and a deep appreciation of nature’s blessing and beauty.

Italian pencil artist Marco Mazzoni‘s work goes far beyond technical perfection. His representation of historical healing women is enigmatic and sublime. Often leaving the eyes blank or covered with an abundance of birds, butterflies and flowers, he gives the impression of a deeper inward focused sight, as well as obscuring the identity of the individual. Many female healers in the past – both medicine woman and midwives – were brutally persecuted by religion, some even burnt as witches… Mazzoni’s work captures their deep connection with nature and their innate power and femininity with delicacy and beautiful detail.

Laszlo Koday was born in Hungary in 1945. In 1970 he began as a self-tought painter. The life and work of Henri Rousseau made a deep impression on him. His pictures are fairy tales expressed by pictorial means, human, animal and nature are equally important in them. There are bright, with unmixed pure colours, compositions wich spread calmness and gaiety. Kaday's works are know not only in Hungary but in many countries and are included in many private and public collections. His paintings can be found in galleries abroad, for example the GINA Gallery.

Tempering the violence of modern weaponry with charmingly rendered creatures, artist Xiau-Fong Wee captures a dark humor in her quirky drawings. While some of the weapons appear terrifyingly realistic, others such as in the ray gun wielding bunny portrait, speaks more to the fantastical worlds of science fiction. The anthropomorphic dispositions of the spectacle-wearing creatures also range in merry reverie to stern seriousness, adding to the delightful nature of these well-executed portraits. View more of the drawings below.

“Scott Linstead is an internationally published, freelance wildlife photographer/writer. His clients include Natural History Magazine, Hewlett Packard, Ranger Rick Magazine and a number of wildlife publications in North America and Europe. Scott's column on the techniques of bird photography appears in every issue of Outdoor Photography Canada”.

Photo: A veiled chameleon extends its tongue to catch a cricket. Canadian wildlife photographer Scott Linstead, formerly an aerospace engineer and high school teacher, uses a device called Phototrap “to not only photograph the elusive, but also the unimaginably quick”. (Photo by Scott Linstead)