Check out Laurie Lipton's astonishing pencil illustrations

It’s not only the level of detail in Laurie Lipton’s drawings which is crazy; the illustrations are too. With charcoal and pencil she creates bonkers worlds in black and white which look like pictures for a short story written by the love child of Charles Dickens and George Orwell. The blacking factory meets Big Brother.

With her art, Laurie said she wanted “to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain.” It’s amazing that she recreates the cavernous halls and tangled machinery she dreams up in such intense and precise structural detail. The Victorian spirit of invention merged with dystopian cynicism is a powerful combination.

I’m more than a little perturbed by some of her Day of the Dead drawings, which are ghostly and pretty grotesque. Stripped of the colour and sense of carnival which pervades Mexican art, they become even more unnerving. Have a gander on her site, but maybe not if you’re just about to go to bed.