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)

People wait on a taxi line near Madison Square Garden, Wednesday, September 23, 2015, as a 225-foot-tall hand-painted billboard of Pope Francis stands out at Eighth Avenue in New York. The billboard, designed by Israel Ochoa of DeSales Media, including a photo by photographer Giulio Napolitano, marks the arrival of the pope Thursday. (Photo by Craig Ruttle/AP Photo)

Israeli couples attend a “trash the dress” event at a paint-ball venue in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, December 25, 2015. Twelve Israeli couples wore their wedding outfits once again on Friday as they took part in a video clip where they deliberately ruined their wedding outfits, in keeping with the trendy wedding style photography dubbed “trash the dress”. (Photo by Amir Cohen/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)

John Malkovich as Marilyn Monroe in a re-creation of Andy Warhol's 1962 painting. The image is a part of the series, “The Malkovich Sessions”, by photographer Sandro Miller and on display at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. Miller wanted to pay homage to the artists who influence his photographic career, and approached Malkovich with the idea of re-creating the famous portraits. (Photo by Sandro Miller/Catherine Edelman Gallery)