The orange and purple ring appears to rotate clockwise on the green background in a twitching or jerky manner.  The effect is enhanced if you move your eyes rapidly around the image or look away from it briefly and then focus on it again.

Compare this effect to another motion illusion created by Professor Kitaoka called Rotating Grapes (where the rotation appears to be much smoother).

(via Akiyoshi Kitaoka)

I’ve been painting a lot of doors in my house lately.  It is a slow process that I have been tackling about two doors at a time.  The results have been worth it as they look much better with two coats of fresh paint on them.  When I came across this illustration, it brought a little smile to my face.  Yes, it is a paintbrush with red paint, but it also has a clever double meaning – the paint lines form the skyline of a famous city.  Can you tell which one it is?

The doors I am painting are white, by the way.  Red doors would clash with the trim.

(via John Tibbott)

Nasa Funahara is a student in the Department of Oil Painting at Musashino Art University in Japan.  Funahara recreates famous artworks using colored masking tape.  Below is a tape version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.  Munch created four different versions of the original work between 1893 and 1910.  One of these versions sold for nearly $120 million in 2012 making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

(via Nasa Funahara)

Today’s illusion has a pretty interesting effect.  We have featured several animations that are similar to this one (see the Turning Wheel Optical Illusion and the Spinning Dancer Illusion), but I still find the effect to be very fascinating.  The train in this animation is moving at a constant rate of speed.  But what direction is it moving?  When you first look at it, you will perceive it as either moving toward you or away from you.  If you watch the train for a little while longer, you will find that it changes directions.  Keep watching and see if you can get the direction that the train is travelling to flip-flop back and forth.

This digital recreation of a portion of Sandro Del-Prete’s The Garden Fence (originally painted in 1969) was created by Josh Sommers.  You can find the original version of The Garden Fence, along with several other works from Del-Prete, in our previous post that featured a collection of his impossible paintings.  This particular homage features a very peculiar fence construction that will leave you a little confused if you try to figure out how it was constructed.

Speaking about recreating Sandro Del-Prete’s original work in a digital format, Josh Sommers offered the following in response to a comment on his Flickr page:

Everyone inspires everyone else, and it just keeps going, with each new artist bringing something new to the table to make the work uniquely his/her own.

Art imitates art.  It always has and always will.

(via Josh Sommers)

Russian born artist Victor Molev is a painter a graphic artist currently living in Ontario, Canada.  He previously worked as both an architect and a theater set painter.  In his painting below, titled Mona Lisa (Water), seven fish jumping out of the water come together to form an image that resembles a portrait of Mona Lisa.

Given the public’s familiarity with Mona Lisa, she is frequently the subject of work by all kinds of artists.  We previously featured a motion illusion called the Moving Mona Lisa Face which provides a pretty powerful effect.

(via Victor Molev)

A photomosaic is an image that has been divided into smaller sections, each of which is replaced with another image matching that particular individual section of the original image.  In this example featuring the Man of Steel, every section of the original image has been replaced with an image of a movie poster.  The creator of this image completed the process using Photoshop and a program called 2gether1 Pro which is a professional mosaic software program.  Using this process, he estimates that the average photomosaic takes anywhere from 2-7 hours to create.

You can get a better feel for how the image is constructed by zooming in and looking at the detail.  Here is a close-up of Superman’s face where you can see some of the individual movie posters that were used.

If you would like to see another deceptive image featuring a comic book hero, be sure to check out Simon C. Page’s Batman vs. Penguin.

(via DolfD on Deviant Art)