You are correct, the first image is an homage to Escher’s “Drawing Hands”. I used his original image to try to exactly reproduce it with a camera. That one was created with three photos: One of each hand and one of the background. The three images were combined in Photoshop and then parts of each hand were filtered to look like pencil drawings.

The second image is the “Droste Effect” applied to the first image. If you check out my stream at flickr.com/photos/joshsommers and look in my sets you’ll find a tutorial for the droste effect if you are interested.

The third one was done very similarly to the first. I sat on a large piece of white cardboard and took a picture of myself. In Photoshop I separated my top half from my bottom half, applied the pencil drawn effect to the bottom half and then painted in my shadows by hand.

The first and third images were shot and photoshopped in the same night. The second one was done almost a year later.

All of my tricks are usually done in Photoshop as opposed to the more creative ideas I read above like using a blue screen or kaleidascope or cut-outs…etc.

Cheers,
Josh