Lauren Davis

Gaming dice get their own personalities in the hands of Lee Bretschneider, who creates portraits of everyone from your everyday d6 to the regal d100. He also dreams up labels for Harry Potter-themed booze, goofy fanart, and plenty of music and roller derby posters.

Patrick Connan's artwork has been making the rounds lately, in part because of his simple but wonderfully clever trio of chess-inspired Lord of the Rings posters and in part because of his contribution to the Hero Complex Gallery's Jaws tribute art show. But Connan has put his spin on many, many more movies, dreaming up new posters and pop culture mashups.

A few weeks ago, artist SalBa Combé tickled our tricolor nostalgia with his remake of The Powerpuff Girls intro sequence. He also plays with the visuals from classic NES games, The Dark Knight Rises and He-Man, when he isn't sketching up his very own Mecha Army.

Artist John Loren's "hypothetical perfect movie" is a stop-motion animated Spider-Man, and offers his own concept design—as well as a few other Spidey-themed drawings. He also imagines his own version of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, caricatures the bands Mumford & Sons and Tenacious D, and sketches up a squirt-gun showdown and a rather dapper zombie. ...

There's a storybook playfulness to Liam Barrett's illustrations that simultaneously evokes Western folk art and modern digital art. So it's appropriate that so many of his pieces feature colorful monsters, coyly macabre cats and devils engaged in nefarious pursuits.

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.