M.C. Escher Would Love This Photograph

By Minnesotastan in Everything Else on Feb 9, 2010 at 12:22 pm


You may need to click/enlarge the image to see the subtlety of the optical illusion.  Then the question to ponder will be whether this is the result of image editing, or whether it was created by clever woodcrafting with veneer.

Photo from Erik Minnema’s photostream, via.


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  1. anonymousbackstabber
    Feb 9th, 2010 at 1:09 pm

    veneer + photoshop

  2. Gauldar
    Feb 9th, 2010 at 1:11 pm

    Pretty good job with that.

  3. Austin
    Feb 9th, 2010 at 8:51 pm

    Funny, I was just about to do the hand on wood illusion myself.

  4. liltrix
    Feb 9th, 2010 at 9:08 pm

    just a photoshop, and not a great one at that but its still clever :)

  5. Squiggy
    Feb 9th, 2010 at 9:17 pm

    I see one block of wood sitting on top of another.

  6. cdreid
    Feb 9th, 2010 at 9:27 pm

    No photoshop. No veneer. Two different sized 1x1's on top of each other. The screws different directions. Fingertips carefully placed creates the illusion as your brain tries to make the object fit two different ideas.

  7. Johnny Cat
    Feb 9th, 2010 at 10:04 pm

    Oh wow... once you see it, you can't unsee it. Clever illusion!

  8. JamesM
    Feb 10th, 2010 at 7:20 am

    Not a photoshop.

    The block on the right is tapered to the front along 3 sides until it ends up being a flat sheet of paperwood. Roughed up grain in the front is there to make it look like it's a different side when it's really the same flat surface by that point.

    What gave it away for me was that some of the shadows were created by pencil.

    Larger image here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35739691@N05/3308876734/sizes/l/

  9. Dennis
    Feb 15th, 2010 at 9:10 pm

    Clearly not done in photoshop. The only clever thing about this is the shadow, and as stated before it is possibly just pencil on the wood. So there may have just been a photographer out there that understands the concept of how to create a shadow that does something for the image. I'm not impressed...

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