The Dutch tessellation whizz M.C.Escher was fascinated by transformations from one tessellation to another, for example in his series of prints Metamorphosis. I’m sure he would have explored animated versions if it had been practical in the 1940’s. So I’ve borrowed a couple of his motifs and animated them. I showed an animated transformation in […]
This is another transformation based on one in my illusion cartoon story. I did it to see whether I could devise an adventure, set in graphic world, with transformations that are forbidden in our everyday world as the events that take the story forward. Most of the transformations, like this one, offer an escape route […]
This is about the simplest of all spatial transformations. In the top picture, the mice are at risk from the cats. In the bottom picture, the stairs have vanished, and as the eye travels along the picture from the left, a concave terrace turns into a convex, step shape. There’s now a protective inside/out space-warp […]
Here’s a new kind of never-ending stair (I think). It’s like the famous never-ending staircase seen from above by M.C.Escher, called Ascending and Descending. However, in this new staircase instead of figures doomed to go downstairs for ever we have penguins destined to walk away from us forever. It’s based on the geometry of the […]
Here are some crazy stairs. Look at the stairs leading up to the balcony, and at the foot of the stairs you’re looking down on them from above, whilst up by the balcony you’re looking up at them from below. Nothing wrong with that, in a perspective view, but these steps are in a […]
Size constancy is the term for our tendency to see distant objects as larger than they are. So the far end of a shape with parallel sides looks wider than the near end. (See the earlier post on The Wonky Window). It seems to be such a basic feature of vision that it can give […]
Here’s another rotating head illusion, just to introduce a list of my favourite illusion books. It’s not one you’ll find in the books, because I only just drew it. Still, that leaves plenty of old illusions, and there are stacks of fun books on the subject, many of them excellent. Here are some I […]
A tessellation is a pattern made up of elements that repeat with no gaps and no overlaps. The elements may be abstract shapes, or may be recognisable objects or creatures, like the ones in the tessellations of M.C.Escher. When I begun playing around with tessellations, I thought understanding the procedures needed to make patterns that […]
For years I’ve wished someone would make an animated cartoon in which the events depend on the kind of visual transformations we see in many illusion pictures. It won’t be easy. Salvador Dali loved effects of these kinds, and helped sketch out a scheme for a Disney movie (though not one with a real storyline) […]
I love tessellations. Here’s quite a complicated example, with a transformation running across it, and an added graphic twist. Want to try your own tessellations? There are software short-cuts you can use but to really get the hang of them, do them by hand, with a graphics package on a computer. (I use the graphics […]
