Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese film director, animator, manga artist, producer, and screenwriter. Through a career that has spanned over fifty years, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a maker of anime feature films and, along with Isao Takahata, co-founded Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio. The success of Miyazaki's films has invited comparisons with American animator Walt Disney, British animator Nick Park and American director Robert Zemeckis.

This picture taken on July 9, 2013 shows heavy flood waters sweeping through Beichuan in southwest China´s Sichuan province. Rainstorms sweeping across parts of China have affected millions, causing landslides and disabling transportation in provinces such as Sichuan and Yunnan, state media reported. (Photo by AFP Photo)

American sculptor Michael Alfano has been sculpting for over fifteen years. A native of New York, he now lives and works in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. His major influences are Salvador Dali, Jo Davidson, and Jean-Antoine Houdon, as well as Buddhist, Taoist, Sufi and other eastern philosophy and literature. He first studied at the Art Students League of New York, with an emphasis on life-size sculpture from the model. His formal education continued at Boston University and was augmented by internships with several prominent sculptors.

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.

Jenny Parks is a scientific illustrator that also happens to be a shameless nerd, with a penchant for drawing animals, dinosaurs, imaginary creatures… and occasionally, people as cats. Somehow, she found herself with a bit of internet fame with the illustration ‘Doctor Mew’, and has been baffled ever since. With a BFA in illustration from the California College of the Arts, and a graduate degree in Science Illustration from UC Santa Cruz, she now resides in San Francisco as a freelance illustrator, fulfilling her destiny to make a living drawing cute, fuzzy things.

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.

Passengers climb to board an overcrowded train at a railway station in Dhaka August 8, 2013. Millions of residents in Dhaka are travelling home from the capital city to celebrate the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. (Photo by Andrew Biraj/Reuters)

Indian boy Hassan Malik works in a leather shoe factory at Topsia in Calcutta, eastern India, 19 November 2013. The leather industry occupies an important place in the Indian economy. It is an employment intensive sector with a vast potential for growth and exports but also a pollution intensive industry that relies on cheap labor. One of the major production centers for leather and leather products is located in Calcutta, West Bengal. Hundreds of tanneries are operated in the city’s Tiljala, Topsia and Tangra districts. They are mostly run by local families living and working under poor conditions. (Photo by Piyal Adhikary/EPA)