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)

Guests dance the Met Gala Party for Jean Paul Gaultier x Shayne Oliver Group held at Sapphire in Manhattan on May 7, 2024. (Photo by Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post)

A bee searches for nectar on a flower in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on Friday, September 19, 2025. (Photo by Boris Roessler/dpa/picture alliance/Getty Images)

Chloe Goodman attending the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them European Premiere at Leicester Square, London. (Photo by Ian West/PA Images via Getty Images)

Singer Taylor Swift poses at the 2016 iHeartRadio Music Awards in Inglewood, California, April 3, 2016. (Photo by Danny Moloshok/Reuters)

“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)

A mechanical horse-dragon made of wood and steel is presented to the public in Nantes, western France on August 26, 2014. This horse-dragon, created by the French artist Francois Delaroziere of “Les Machines de l'île” (The Machines of the Isle), is the hero of the show "Long Ma" which will be presented in Beijing on October 17, 2014 as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the relationship between France and China. (Photo by Jean-Sebastien Evrard/AFP Photo)

A pair of young visitors rushes through a tunnel of colored lights at the annual Garden of Lights display at Brookside Gardens on December, 06, 2015 in Silver Spring, MD. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)