I am extremely saddened to have learned about the passing of one of the great masters of illusion – Rob Gonsalves. According to his official Facebook page, Rob passed away on June 14, 2017. I just found out about this a week ago when speaking to a mutual acquaintance. I was fortunate to feature several […]
Twenty-four year old Japanese artist Nagai Hideyuki creates deceptive pencil drawings on paper. The example below is a sketch he did that features an impossible stairway that he calls ‘Strange Positional Relationship’. It would appear that if either of these blob-looking creatures were to head up or down the stairs, they would end up on […]
Take a quick look at this cat on a stairway. Do you think that the cat is climbing up the stairs and heading down the stairs? Depending on how you look at it, you can probably perceive either to be true. Maybe there are some clues on the photograph that could help you draw your […]
David Macdonald, the creator of this impossibly perplexing scene, had the following to say about this work: The pathways in this building are in fact a single horizontal plane. There are no less than twenty two false links which treat this single plane as different levels …… stairs and ladders which simply serve to join […]
Thomas Barbèy has a collection of photographs that were taken over a period of twenty years. By combining multiple photographs from his archives, he creates unique and beautiful surreal scenes. According to his official website, “Every single one of his images has to pass what he likes to call the “So what?” test. If […]
Please note that a new feature has been added to An Optical Illusion. Directly under the search bar on the right hand side is a link titled Random Optical Illusion. Clicking this link will do exactly what you think it might do – it will load a random post from our database. While I was […]
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 […]
