Ramon Bruin, a freelance artist from the Netherlands, uses his skills to create 3D optical illusion drawings with pencils. Every single one of these drawings play with perspective, and appear to pop out from the paper when viewed from the right angle. Continue reading to see more – bonus video included.
3 Interesting facts:
- In the ancient world, people didn’t know if optical illusions were the “fault” of the eyes or the mind. The first recorded theorizers on optical illusions were the Greek thinkers Epicharmus and Protagorus in 450 BCE. Epicharmus implicated the body whereas Protagorus implicated the mind. One hundred years later, Aristotle came up with a view balancing these extremes. In the twentieth century, artists began experimenting with illusions, in a movement known as optical art or “op art.” By challenging the viewer to make sense of all sides of the illusion, op art made its audience participants in the artwork.
- Nearly all forms of media are optical illusions. Print in books and newspapers is not made up of solid letters, but are in fact dots of black, red, yellow and blue ink placed so closely together the mind perceives them as solid. Television screens work in a similar way — images on screen are not always the colors they appear to be but are in fact tiny dots of red, blue and green light projected so closely together that they are perceived as all different colors. This illusion of making a full-color image from only primary colors is called dithering.
- Movies are possible because of principle called “persistence of vision,” the principle that images remain on the eye for 1/17 of a second, meaning images flashed faster than that (most movies are shot at 24 frames per second) cannot be perceived as separate images, creating the illusion of moving images. Common colorblindness tests are types of optical illusions. Everyone sees the same image, but a normal sighted person perceives the pattern of dots in a circle as one number, and colorblind people will perceive different numbers depending on their type of colorblindness.
