The Art of Deception

Yesterday, I received a copy of book "The Art of Deception" by Brad Honeycutt. This is an excellent compilation of different kind of optical illusions, which were artistically represented by many modern artists around the world.

There were presented on only traditional techniques of art, but also marquetry, sculpture and others.

This book should be in collection of everyone, who interested modern art and optical illusions.

Illusion - Confusion

Recently, I received a book "Illusion - Confusion" by Paul Baars, in which he collected examples of almost all known kinds of illusions. There's a lagre section about impossible figures in the book. Among other images, there's one my impossible figure published there.

The distinctive feature of the book is using double page spread for representing large images. For example, Escher's Metamorphoses II fit into two fragments, when in meny other book it was divided into much more parts.

The book will be a good supplement for collectioners and astonishing gift for everyone.

Wooden work by Michael Cheshire

Today I received a wooden work by Michael Cheshire. It's one of his series of artworks with cats. Here, you can see a cat looking at huge moon. The scene is decorated by impossible frame.

Michael Cheshire creates his works from many kinds of wood. You can see more his works and by them at his web site http://www.woodenart.com.au/

Spiral trees

Trees are the great form of nature and this the shape made many inspiration for numerous artists of mathematical art. I've posted several collections of fractal trees and pythagoras trees. And we've also met with combination of tree-like shape with spiral. Spirals are one of basic mathematical shapes and they are harmoniously match to branchy tree figure. Also spiral is the shape that very close to fractals.

Below, you can see several spiral shapes, which look very interesting for me. They are not true fractals, but they make sence of great curly figures. Click on images to see them in better quality.

Black spiral tree 

 © Willy Deganello

Logo of the site The Spiral Tree 

Curly cone tree from article of Cameron Browne about spiral space filling  

Spiral dotted tree 

by baggingspam

A fractal-like spiral tree. Smaller branches repeat their parent branch.

Images were found at

• http://ru.depositphotos.com/6475327/stock-illustration-black-spiral-tree-.html
• http://www.thespiraltree.co.uk
• http://www.cameronius.com/graphics/spiral-packing-figures/
• http://baggingspam.deviantart.com/art/Spiral-dot-tree-win-ver-52496424
• http://www.dragonartz.net/2009/09/03/curl-tree-design-vector/

The Art of the Illusion

Today I have received a copy of a book by Brad Honeycutt and Terry Stickels "The Art of the Illusion", which consists of more than 200 wonderful images of optical illusions, which were created by many artists all around the world. Artworks by such famous artists as M.C. Escher, Jos de Mey, Rob Gonsalved are combined with artworks by many modern artists, who devoted their lives to creation of optical illusions. The foreword of the book was written by artist Scott Kim, which is well known for his puzzles and ambigrams (upside down lettering).

You can buy the book at Amazon.

Below, you can see photos of two photos of spreads of the book.

Fractal fonts

The letter A above consists of many Sierpinski triangles, blank spaces of which are colored black. Using of triangular grid to form letter gives some Gothic effect. Font designer Frodo7 created a font Sierpinski Black using such principle, which consist of 87 characters inluding Latin capital and lower letters and numbers. A sample pattern of the font is represented below. Artist created several variations of this font with different kinds of filling of letters.

Frodo7 also created another font based on fractal Fractal font, where letters look like wide tape, which curl into form of lowercase letters. Letters are filled with fractal pattern of black and white rectangles. Sample letters and fractal pattern, which is used for filling letter, are represented below.

Another fractal font was created by Tony de Marco. It is based on simple raster font, where letters are divided into pixels. Every pixel is separate fractal of regular located circles.

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If you know another fonts based on fractals, please let me know, I will happy to update this post.

Calendar 2011

A new block calendar on year 2011 was designed at Paul Baars Design. As the calendar 2010 this one contains of 365 various optical illusions. With it you will begin every new day of 2010 year from new unique illusory image of such famous artists as M.C. Escher, Jos de Mey and Istvan Orosz or less known but not less interesting artists.

It's very valuable for me that one of my impossible figures was published in the calendar.

You can buy it at Applaus! Producten.

New set of fractal trees - 2

Today, I represent a small but nevertheless interesting set of fractal trees of various kinds.

Two mystical fractal trees by Jacob Ankney (Jeddaka).

A new variation of Pythagoras tree with curl as base figure for duplication in fractal, which was created by IDeviant.

And, in conclusion two fractal images from Shutterstock. The first can be bought here, the second is no longer represented there.

Jos de Mey: Illusionistische Malerei

A great book Jos de Mey: Illusionistische Malerei was issued by Edition Virgines in Düsseldorf in 2010. The book describes the life and work of Belgian artist Jos de Mey who devoted his life to drawing impossible figures.

Jos de Mey (1928-2007) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Ghent (Belgium). Then he spent 39 year to teaching interrior design and color there. Since 1968 he had concentrated in art. He spent a lot of time on the image of various mathematical relations such as golden section and Fibonacci sequence. He created many artworks with Pythagoras trees. In the past of 1970s he began to draw impossible figures. He depicted very realistic impossible figures in traditional Flemish environment.

The book contains 235 images of artworks of Jos de Mey from private collections. Images cover entire period of his creativity work from 1960s until his end. Also, the book contains full artist biography with 30 photos of Jos de Mey, bibliography, articles of Jos de Mey and his friends. Changing of artist's style can be traced in the chronilogical artwork index.

You can buy the book at Edition Virgines or at Amazon.de.

Below, you can see some photos of the book.

Fractal architecture

Not only abstract images can be created with fractals, but also very impressive images of strange towers and temples. Some time before I posted fractal image of a fractal temple. Now, the next some surrealistic images of fractal towers are represented below.

Medieval fractal (by Ramiro Perez)

Sunset Castle (by Ramiro Perez)

Ivory Tower - 2 (by Stefan Vitanov)

Airy (by Stefan Vitanov)

More images of fractal architecture can be found at

http://rfractals.net/?page_id=64 (Ramiro Perez)

http://www.fractalexperience.com/show_gallery.php?gallery=18&range=5&page=1 (Stefan Vitanov)

Mandelbulb

The Mandelbrot set is one of the most known fractal. It can be seen on many sites and images over the Internet. It was represented in many variations. Today, many fractal artists create beautiful images, which are based on it. But all this time it remained only a two dimensional fractal.

Of course, many artists created 3D images with it. Below you can see the Mandelbrot fractal (to the left) and such pseudo-3D. But as you can see, the figure to the right is the same 2D fractal, in which values of the fractal are representes as levels above the base plane.

It remained two-dimensional until Daniel White and Paul Nylander constructed a three dimensional analog of the Mandelbrot set, using an hypercomplex algebra based on spherical coordinated, when in classic Mandelbrot set algebra of complex numbers were used. They called their creation Mandelbulb.

You can read about history of creation of Mandelbulb and many images of it at http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html. Here, there are very large image of the fractal wholly and images of some it's parts.

The Mandelbulb opended the door to a new class of wonderful fractals.

Artforms of Nature and fractals

The nineteen century German biologist Ernst Haeckel is famous for his fantastically illustrated book Artforms of Nature. The copyright for this book from 1904 has now expired and thanks to Wikimedia Commons it is available for everyone to appreciate.

Haekel's artistic interpretation of the biological forms he studied have a clarity of symmetry and detail that has been a source of inspiration for many artists and engineers over the years. They provide the perfect subject matter for Photoshop plugin Pixel Bender Fractal Explorer. The plugin was created by Tom Beddard.

Below, you can see the original image of Ophiodea (to the left) and fractal based on the original images, which created with help of Pixel Bender Fractal Explorer. The fractal has the same symmetry as the original image.

Another example, the Phaeodaria and two fractals, which are based on it. Fractals have another type of symmetry, but, nevertheless, they are look very natural.

Mini books of Anatoly Konenko

Yesterday, I received the smallest book of those that I have ever hold in my hands, which is entitled as "Secrets of impossible figures". The dimensions of the book are 3x5 cm. You can compare it's size with a 1 euro coin on the photo above. The book is filled of images of impossible figures. It was published in very limited edition, only 30 copies.

The author of the book is Anatoly Konenko from Omsk (Russia). He is famous for his mini and micro works. He began to create mini and micro artworks since 1981. He invented technology of writing on rice and poppy grains and later on human hair. He have done many micro works in various styles - graphics, sculpture, carving on wood and bones, juvellery and knitting.

The field, in which Konenko is well known, is creating and publishing of mini books. He have done more than 200 mini books since 1994. All his books have high quality binding and inimitable elegant ornaments and decorations. With the publication of his books Anatoly Konenko is an artist, designer, engraver and bookbinder at the same time.

In 1996 he created the smallest book the world with sizes 0,9 x 0,9 mm, which was signed in the Guinness book. The photo of the book you can see below.

Visit web site of Anatoly Konenko to see more photos of miniatures, books, and impossible figures.