illustration

Just about everyone in Sam Taylor's hyperactive cartoon grotesqueries is drunk: three-eyed Woody Woodpecker, Doctor Manhattan and hard-partying octopodes. Hell, even his anthropomorphic drugs are drunk. His bug-eyed, brightly colored style is a neat match for the characters from The Simpsons, whom he makes just a little sadder and more twisted than usual.

Brothers Juan and Alejandro Mingarro operate the Barcelona-based studio Brosmind, where they pump out playful and surreal sculptures and illustrations. They pack their crowded images with adorable animals, sentient ice cream cones and a bikini-clad babe who rides titans made of cake, sea monsters and roving cities.

The unexpected is the norm in Uetsuji Shotaro's beautifully bizarre illustrations, where whales and sharks sail through the skies, rooms are lit by the glow of pink mushrooms, ghosts and octopodes turn up everywhere, and 3D glasses reveal the unseen horrors of the universe.

Minneapolis College of Art & Design student John Wilinski has a wonderfully fun portfolio up on Tumblr, filled with portraits of Batman villains and Adventure Time characters, amusing takes on Arrested Development, Star Wars and Game of Thrones, and his responses to prompts from his digital illustration class.

I first met Sophia Foster-Dimino at San Francisco Zine Fest this past year, and quickly became fascinated with her carefully composed scenes, where parallel lines give a simultaneous sense of structure and surreality, and cleanly laid out objects invite viewers to speculate on the lives of her subjects. That thoughtful approach to space stands out in her comics as well.

It must be exhausting to be a monster, what with everyone expecting you to be frightening and angry all the time. Patrick Dean, however, draws pictures of monsters in their more casual moments, taking seaside walks, enjoying a quiet smoke and romancing the ladies. His humans, on the other hand, are often entrenched in moments of crime and mystery.

Henrique Jardim is a storyboard artist and animator, and his personal work is filled with gleefully expressive faces and bodies flung into whatever position their task demands. But what really stands out is Jardim's sense of humor, which ranges from the absurdity of children delighted by their monstrous playmate to a commentary on fictional ladies' body-baring armor to the unexpected treasure of a

Jemma Salume composes fanciful and nature-inspired illustrations with a strong sense of the mythological. Majestic tigers stretch and snarl in glowing scenes while mystical lovers steal kisses amongst brilliant fields of butterflies. Zebras and hyenas dance a deadly dance in the natural world's veldt, while in otherworldly forests, sirens and avian geishas wait to feed.

Many of Laura Knetzger's charming watercolor paintings are self-portraits, but with unusual secondary subjects, spending time with video game characters, especially those from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. That's when she isn't painting scenes from other games, anime, or The Hobbit.

"Clowns don't always have to be scary," Wook Jin Clark notes on his website. "hey can just be silly." Many of his illustrations play with the visual ideas of clowns, with lots of wig-like hair and white gloves — although sometimes frightening things do befall his clown characters. But his artwork isn't limited to polka dots and red noses; he also draws heroic women, brutish mon