Los Angeles native Mike Stilkey has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. (Photo by Mike Stilkey)

A) 1st place WINNER – Roy Rimmer. “This rat was in an outdoor set I made, the set up is two meters long and a meter wide made of Perspex,it has a plywood front with holes cut in for my camera and flash guns, I placed two rusty paint cans in the set up and the rat would leap from one can too the other, I had to use flash to freeze the action”.

Revellers celebrate "Ash Monday" by participating in a colourful "flour war", a traditional festivity marking the end of the carnival season and the start of the 40-day Lent period until the Orthodox Easter,in the port town of Galaxidi, some 215 km (134 miles) north west of Athens, March 18, 2013. The revellers "fight" by throwing coloured flour, charcoal dust and powder painting until they essentially run out of supplies. (Photo by Yannis Behrakis/Reuters)

A badly-weathered composition doll, made from compressed wood chip, has its flakey paint cut off before being repaired and repainted by Gail Grainger, a 14-year veteran doll repairer at Sydney's Doll Hospital, August 19, 2014. Opened in 1913, Sydney's Doll Hospital has worked on millions of dolls, teddy bears and other toys. Behind a toy shop on a busy suburban street in Sydney's south, “doll surgeons” transplant fingers, toes and heads, and repair broken eye sockets in dolls who were the victim of a childhood tantrum or sibling rivalry, sometimes decades ago. (Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters)

Jude Hajjaj, carries her cat near a picture of her cat painted on the wall by her father Osama Hajjaj, who teams up with his neighbours in creating works of art at their roof during the curfew imposed by the Jordanian government amid concerns over the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Amman, Jordan, May 10, 2020. (Photo by Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)

An artwork called “Beyond Crisis” by French artist Guillaume Legros aka Saype and created with an eco paint made out of chalk and coal over a 3000 sqm field is pictured during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Leysin, Switzerland, April 24, 2020 in this picture obtained by Reuters April 26, 2020. (Photo by Valentin Flauraud/SAYPE/Handout via Reuters)

A string art picture made by artist Ani Abakumova in a workshop in the village of Romashkovo in Moscow Region, Russia on August 2, 2019. Ani Abakumova and her husband Andrei Abakumov create string art replicas of famous paintings. Andrei makes computer calculations that show patterns for future images, then Ani winds coloured strings around nails hammered around a plywood board. (Photo by Anton Novoderezhkin/TASS)

A giant biodegradable landart painting entitled “Vers l'equilibre” (Towards balance) by French-Swiss artist Saype is pictured near the summit of the Grand Chamossaire mountain, above the alpine resort of Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland, Wednesday, July 06, 2022. Extending over an area of 2500 square meters, this fresco was created using biodegradable pigments made out of charcoal, chalk, water and milk proteins. (Photo by Valentin Flauraud/Keystone via AP Photo)