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Optical illusion art

Drawings that fool the eye. Impossible figures, bulges in flat grids, lines that look bent and dots that flicker, each made from precise geometry that the visual system reads wrongly.

Optical illusions

16

What each one draws

Café Wall

Offset rows of blocks divided by thin mortar. Every row is exactly horizontal, and almost nobody sees them that way.

Zöllner Lines

Long parallels crossed by short strokes that lean one way, then the other. The parallels lean with them.

Scintillating Grid

Pale bars with a disc at every crossing. Dark spots appear in the discs you are not looking at, and never in the one you are.

Peripheral Drift

Nothing here moves. Each band runs dark to light the same way round, and the field creeps sideways whenever you look past it.

Necker Lattice

A field of wireframe cubes with nothing to say which face is nearer. Stare, and the whole field turns inside out at once.

Fraser Spiral

Concentric circles built from leaning cords. Trace one with a finger and it closes; let go and it winds inward again.

Op Bulge

A flat grid, pushed outward from the middle. The page stays flat and a sphere sits on it anyway.

Kanizsa Contours

Discs with a bite taken out of each. The shape between them has edges, a surface and a brightness, and none of it is drawn.

Penrose Tribar

Three arms of cubes, each turning a square corner on the last, arriving back where they began. Follow any arm and it is ordinary.

Quasicrystal

Five or seven flat waves laid over one another at equal angles. Order everywhere, and the same patch never twice.

Moiré Circles

Two sets of rings, drawn a little apart. Where they disagree, a second family of curves appears that neither one contains.

Jessen's Icosahedron

Twenty triangles whose every pair of neighbours meets at a right angle. Six pairs fold into deep notches, so a regular icosahedron turns star-like.

Lattice Knots

Closed loops of square bar that only ever run along the edges of a cube grid. Three tones are all it takes to read them as solid.

Interlock

A plain grid of squares whose shared edges bend across the sheet until the tiles lock together like creatures. However far they bend, every tile still fits its neighbours exactly.

Unsettled

A grid of squares in perfect order at one end, each square turned and shifted a little more along the sheet, until the far rows lie scattered.

Ouchi Illusion

A disc of upright bricks on a field of bricks lying flat. Let your eyes wander and the disc seems to float and slide on its own, though nothing on the page moves.