Optical illusions in pictures, with notes on creating your own effects
Useful Links
The following sites offer useful and interesting illusion related resources.
Amazing Art
http://members.lycos.nl/amazingart/E/6.html
Invertible pictures on a site packed with puzzle pictures and illusions.
[See commentary to picture 3]
[See commentary to picture 3]
An ambiguous image of a head
http://www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/ash/news/news038.html
A (rather rude) example of an ambiguous image on a sixteenth century plate that Oxford's Ashmolean Museum bought in 2003.
[See commentary to picture 1]
[See commentary to picture 1]
Artlandia Symmetry Works
http://www.artlandia.com/products/symmetryworks/index.html
A commercial plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, for making symmetry patterns.
[See commentary to picture 15]
[See commentary to picture 15]
Blurring and figure/ground effects
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/cog_blur_nosex/index.html
A demonstration of this effect on a website crammed with brilliant illusion stuff, illustrated with great animations.
[See commentary to picture 22]
[See commentary to picture 22]
Braque's "Still life with Violin And Pitcher"
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/braque/v_pitchr.jpg.html
Notice the illusionistic nail and shadow at the top of the painting. Braque wanted to emphasise that the whole of the rest of the picture is just a surface - a picture within a picture - although it's full of suggestions of relief and volume.
[See commentary to picture 25]
[See commentary to picture 25]
Carte Blanche by Rene Magritte
http://www.cord.edu/faculty/andersod/magritte.html
View this and other paintings by Magritte in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon online.
[See commentary to picture 11]
[See commentary to picture 11]
DMOZ Directory Of Optical Illusions
http://dmoz.org/Games/Puzzles/Brain_Teasers/Optical_Illusions/
The optical illusion category of the DMOZ directory contains links to great sites on visual illusions generally.
Gershon Elber
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gershon/EscherForReal/
Numerous exotic versions of impossible figures by Gerschon Elber, some multi-sided, along with a variety of pictures of real twisty three-dimensional versions of them.
[See commentary to picture 13]
[See commentary to picture 13]
Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Paintings
http://www.illumin.co.uk/svank/biog/arcim/arcidx.html
Ambiguous pictures of heads that are also assemblies of fish, vegetables and many other components, painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo about four hundred years ago.
[See commentary to picture 1]
[See commentary to picture 1]
Google's directory of illusion sites.
http://dir.google.com/alpha/Top/Games/Puzzles/Brain_Teasers/Optical_Illusions
Great websites about illusions listed in Google's subject index.
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/p/pozzo
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/p/pozzo
An image of a famous trompe l'oeil ceiling in Rome, in which it's hard to tell real from painted architectural detail.
[See commentary to picture 21]
[See commentary to picture 21]
Patrick Heron's picture January 1973 16
http://www.umt.edu/partv/famus/print/heron1.htm
Figure/ground effects appear in this abstract by Patrick Heron in the University of Montana Museum of Fine Arts.
[See commentary to picture 22]
[See commentary to picture 22]
Picasso's Girl Before A Mirror
http://www.moma.org/collection/provenance/items/2.38.html
A face that can be seen as full-face or profile in this painting by Picasso in Moma, New York
[See commentary to picture 22]
[See commentary to picture 22]
The glare effect and the perception of luminosity
http://www.perceptionweb.com/perabs/p30/p3009.html
Synopsis of a (seriously technical) scientific account of the glare effect.
[See commentary to picture 14]
[See commentary to picture 14]