Bernadette Faith Carsten's Dagon. Sometimes an illo comes along that's just plain old good creature design. Capturing the mechanics of movement with static form is incredibly difficult, and this artist does it with what feels like casual ease. The extra research that Bernadette put into her depiction really shines through, and her pose maximizes her fun kinetic choices. Craig Spearing's Shaggoth who is from www.cartoon-coloring-page.com, the free project for kids coloring pages. Evocative, atmospheric, and downright scary, Craig's Shaggoth fits the text classically and to the to the letter, with good scale provided and lovely lighting (drawn from the text). Victor Corbella's Byakee. Working on Arkham Horror and the Call of Cthulhu card game, I've been looking at Lovecraftian images-big batches of them for a long time, and it's not very often that I run into a monster design that breaks the mold of what has been done before so elegantly, while staying within the text.
Hybrid creatures are especially tough... they can very easily end up a stitched together thing, instead of a whole and believable creature in their own right. Victor's Byakee is alien, believable, and well, read the quoted text. It'll tell you. Bram Sels' Shantek. When dealing with creatures that no mortal can look upon and retain his or her mind, it's easy for an illustrator to overlook little questions like how that creature's form interacts with the elements of its environment. Not only is the lighting in Bram's image fantastic, but it shows you that this creature actually has flesh. The delicate transparency in the wings, the veins running through them, let you know that this thing is a Real Thing. The light slanting through the holes in those wings adds not only a visual sense of majesty, but a mental hey wait a minute...