Patrick Kruger from Seattle brought a 14 foot Christmas tree home that would not fit into his house.  So he naturally did what anyone else would do…  he cut the top of the tree off and attached it to his roof.  A few deceptively placed shingles help create the effect that the tree is busting through roof of his home.

Well done, Mr. Kruger!

A family opens their front door on Christmas morning only to be frightened by what they see.  But should they be?  What is so scary about this Santa Claus illustration by Russian cartoonist Valentine Dubinin?

Despite being completely landlocked, Alberta is host to the largest naval museum in Canada.  According to their website, “you’ll learn about the ships that Canadian sailors have plied the seas in for over 100 years, and the sailors themselves who have worked to protect our sovereignty, our freedoms and the longest coastline in the world.”  The museum took an interesting approach on this deceptive billboard advertisement.

This ambigram, created by John Langdon, features two words with opposite meanings that can be seen individually by rotating the image 180 degrees.  Shown at this angle, the word TRUE can be seen and a very fancy font.

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Two young women ascend a set of stairs and cross paths.  Are they each looking in a mirror simultaneously?

The artist, David Macdonald, notes that:

This illusion was made over a period of about a month: including preliminary pencil sketches and planning, drawing the initial construction, taking about 130 photographs from which the final few were chosen, and creating the composite.

Outside of squares and rectangles, I have never been any good at drawing on an Etch-A-Sketch.  Every now and then I see a picture on the Internet that someone drew on one and I am completely blown away.  I suppose that like anything else in life, practice makes perfect.  It should come as no surprise that optical illusions have graced the black and white screens of this toy from The Ohio Art Company.  The impossible triangle below was found on Flickr as drawn by etcha.

While they are not all illusions, his photostream contains a number of other very impressive works of Etch-A-Sketch art and are worth checking out.

If you are tired of having a boring old garage door, consider breathing some life into it with a trompe l’oeil billboard.  Style Your Garage, from Germany, has created a series of posters that can be applied directly to garage doors.  When the doors are closed, it appears that they are open (and more often than not filled with something unusual).  The examples below show what it would look like if a tank, police car or elephant were parked in your garage.

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