In 2012, Marlin Peterson created a large trompe l-oeil mural on the roof of a building in Seattle, Washington. When viewed from a high vantage point, it appears that a pair of extremely large daddy long legs spiders are sunning themselves on top of the building. The mural was designed to be viewed by visitors [...]
In March, internationally recognized street artist Tracy Lee Stum created the following 3D chalk drawing in Los Angeles, California. The image was inspired by Life of Pi, a movie directed by Ang Lee that won four Academy Awards (including Best Director). Tracy’s art recreates a pivotal scene from the movie in which a large whale [...]
Japanese artist Nagai Hideyuki created this 3D pencil drawing which he titled “Beckoning to the Evil”. By arranging two sketchbooks perpendicular to one another and using an anamorphic drawing technique, he creates the illusion that the hand is actually reaching out from behind the parallel bars.
Gregor Wosik is a street painter with exceptional talent. He was born in Poland but currently resides in Germany where he works as a freelance artist. His street painting below makes it seem that a waterfall running down the center of a street. Several other photographs, including one that shows the painting from the opposite [...]
A number of ambigrams from Michigan State University professor Punya Mishra have been featured on An Optical Illusion in the past. I just discovered a short video that he created at the end of last year wishing everyone an outstanding 2013. In the video, he uses a bit of anamorphic trickery to fool the viewers [...]
Noah Scalin likes skulls. He is the founder of the Skull-A-Day project. Now in its sixth year, the project features a new image of a skull every day. In 2012, Scalin created the following anamorphic skull using 497 VHS cassette tapes as a commission of the TCC Visual Arts Center in Tidewater Virginia. The skull [...]
A series of balls appear to roll up hill. However, as you will quickly suspect, everything is not always what it appears to be. Once the camera moves to a different angle, the true shape of these ramps are revealed. Through an anamorphic trick in their design, the ramps appear to be angled upward [...]
