Brooklyn artist Lizz Hickey specializes primarily in print, her DIY comics-inspired imagery translating well into the medium with their blobs of shape and color layered over with intricate patterns and trippy, surreal details.

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Josh Pogue’s style reminds me of old DIY punk and metal demo covers, but he takes things to a different level with his intricately patterned, fantastical scenes that look like pages out of a demented storybook.

My previous post about Jimmy Joe Roche was less than glowing because I based my opinion on a few silly videos I saw which embodied a certain type of sloppy-passing-for-DIY thing that pervades the art scene in Baltimore.

I saw some of his paper-cut works online, but the small images on his MySpace page didn’t impress me much. Recently, though, I got to see several of these pieces as well as some new ones, and they really blew me away with their intricacy and scale. Each piece is composed of completely symmetrical and painstakingly cut-out paper silhouettes of different colors layered on top of each other to create images that look like abstract, jellyfish gods. Additionally, I saw some datamoshed videos he did during a live music set that had some pretty awe-inspiring moments, turning some footage from classic movies into a drippy, glitchy nightmare.

Aurel Schmidt’s intricate drawings make me want to start a band just so I can use it as album art. The DIY-outsider tack many artists have taken of late has produced some art that makes you think ‘I could do that’, but Schmidt’s work is inimitable — her rendering of hair must make other artists furious with envy.