By on November 20, 2010, with 70 Comments

The accompanying description to this illusion should go something like this: “Them little maids have been to town to purchase postage stamps”. Then it’s your assignment to rotate the picture by 180 degrees, and read: “And now are much alarmed to note their actions watched by tramps”! It took sometime before I could see the maids transform to “tramps“, but describing those little mutants as “maids” was even more puzzling to me! The style however closely matches the “Drowning or Safe” illusion. Could it be the author is the same?


Comments

70 Responses
  1. layne says:

    what does “maids” and “tramps” mean because in the first picture i see people in the second one i see men with hats…

  2. anonymous says:

    Hi Im 10 yrs old, so i dont know what tramps are. By the way, I’m a huge fan. I look at your website everyday. I hope you keep posting more illusions. Back to the illusion. So I suppose that the maids’ hair are the beards od the tramps. And another BTW, 1st comment!

    • anonymous says:

      I’m so sorry for my spelling mistake. I type so fast that I dont check wat I wrote. “od” is suppose to be “of”. Thank you. And please keep posting more illusions

  3. The illusions are always good, but you should have less distracting advertisements.

    Cool

    UAD

  4. No says:

    Bodys make the tramps hat , and the tramps are peering over the fence. Ps, 1st!!!!!

  5. chris says:

    i dont see it someone help!

  6. fossda says:

    1st comment

    the faces look like other faces when turned upside down.

  7. Rickford says:

    It helps to know that when you rotate the picture the tramps are looking over the fence. It took me a while!

  8. John says:

    Totslly miss it…

  9. M says:

    I needed the help of the drowning/safe illusion to get this, but once I discerned the mouths within the beards it was quite easy to see them as tramps wearing hats. The red dude was the hardest for me.

  10. Eva says:

    Me and my husband was like this when we saw it: :O Very nice illusion!

    • nadia says:

      this is for ms eva CORRECT ENGLISH GRAMMER IS MY HUSBAND I NOT ME AND HUSBAND I GUESS U LIVE IN A COUNTRY THAT ENGLISH IS A SECOND LANGUAGE FOR YOURSELF ITS HARD FOR YOU UNDERSTAND OR COMPREHEND OH WELL READ THE DICTIONARY OR SOME GOOD BOOKS IT WILL HELP YOU TO UNDERSTAND THE ENLGISH LANGUAGE A BIT BETTER KEEP READING EVA!

    • bosco says:

      nadia- Your grammar is not exactly perfect. Maybe you should be more careful, run-on sentences are also syntax errors. You left out punctuation and everything is in capitol letters.

  11. Davor says:

    Sadly, I don’t get it. Can anyone explain to me what I should be seeing?

  12. Gil Pinheiro says:

    Meh didn’t like this one as the previous posts =\

  13. qwertyuiop says:

    they dont really look like ladies to me…

  14. Danielle says:

    It took me fifteen minutes to figure this one out I kept looking for hookers or dogs :p my bad I should have searched the definition of tramp after the first three minutes!

  15. anonymous says:

    sooo… are those kids then upside down theyre old men with beards looking over the fence? Or what is this besides terrible…

  16. Jeff says:

    I would’ve been like, “screw this” if you told me they were all the same size or something.

  17. cram says:

    tramps? with beards?
    am i missing something?

  18. cram says:

    ohhh sorry I just googled that, it makes sense now. I’m not used to american english :)

  19. zwerty says:

    Are they coming out of rubbish bins or something

  20. Brassrhino says:

    What’s a Tramp? =L

  21. SDER says:

    I don’t get it, what am I supposed to see when I look for the tramps?

  22. took me a couple of seconds but now I see them looking down over the fence

  23. Terry Foss says:

    I don’t get the maids and tramps thing but I do see the trensformation. Pretty cool.

  24. T.Marie says:

    I Dont get it?? Maybe a better explanation..

  25. pixie-dust says:

    I so don’t get this. Please could sum1 explain it.

  26. Nona says:

    ok i get it. maids are lil ugly ppl in sleeping bags and rotated the sleeping bags become hats of tramps looking over the fence. can kinda make out mouths in the ‘maids’ hair

  27. Gigi says:

    A very simple, yet effective illusion.

  28. Nn says:

    hmm…. rubbish illusion. it would be quite good if the artist could actually draw! :/

  29. jorjeea says:

    nice! (:

  30. Kimon says:

    Top-hats and beards. Took a while to see.

  31. Derek Thomas Hunter says:

    this sucks real bad, what in the name of god are you talking about. FAIL

  32. Monxy says:

    Oh, nice. Took me some time to change “Maids” in to “Tramps”. It’s easiest to begin with the first one because it’s possible to see the mouth within the beard. Very good one.

  33. Rosy B Hunt says:

    The Maids and Tramps illusion looks to me very like the work of Gustave Verbeek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Verbeek)
    famous for his reversible cartoon strips “Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo.

  34. troll says:

    i dont get it…

  35. Error Ash says:

    I dont’t get it at all?! What am i suppposed to see?

  36. Charles says:

    This looks like the work of Gustave Verbeek –
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Verbeek -
    who did the marvellous invertable strip “Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo”.

  37. Nomis says:

    That’s rubbish…
    I thought until It just ‘jumped’ out at me
    first I looked at the eyebrows, then suddenly I noticed its their heads you can see and their bodies are behind the fence?
    that correct?
    I think the yellow guy looks better

  38. Pedro says:

    No matter how hard I try I can just see the maids upside down, HALP! :P

  39. galloots says:

    ohhhh now i see it, i thought they were people walking in a school lol

  40. Annishia says:

    ummmm ppl, then ppl upside down?? on a fence?? i had to read the comments before i got it… ive been staring at it for half an hour…

  41. Jupiter says:

    Ugggg. Its a nice illusion but so UGLY…. I do see the maids but they look like ugly “little people” dolls I played with as kids. No arms or legs and on little pegs so you can put them in little holes so they can “sit” on a chair or something. The tramps took me a while. I knew a tramp was a scruffy hobo like guy but it took me a little while to see the guys beards in the “maid’s hair” and the scruffy hats made from the “maid’s dresses”. Nice illusion but awful artwork.

  42. cindi says:

    1st picture looks angry people walking down the sidewalk wearing trash cans. I suppose the trash cans or dresses, making them maids. The 2nd picture took me a long time to see but it is old men with beards, wearing funking looking hats, peering over the fence. Focus on the eyes and it will fall into place

  43. ZL123 says:

    The maids are hung to the ceiling…
    I took time to notice.

    (BTW, anonymous, I am also ten!)

  44. alicia says:

    hi im 9 yrs old but i love this site i go on it nearly every day! keep it up!

  45. Josh says:

    eehm. Ok, I see the Tramps now. I am not sure whether the way they look over the fence is very natural though. How is their neck positioned…?

  46. Helle says:

    The Yellow tramp did it for me

  47. Kimon says:

    I finally get it! The tramps are looking over the fence. That’s why you can only see the heads.

    If you reverse the order of the pics, you get the maids looking up at the tramps lwhile the tramps look down on them over the fence and the story/description fits!

  48. glp says:

    this illusion was bby far the biggest waste of time ive ever experienced on this website. This illusion was so god awful im disapointed that you would even recognize it as an illusion, and post it it on your fantastic website. This “illusion” brought down the outstanding quality of this website drastically. I hope i never see something so incoherently stupid and meaningless. I understand the illusion, yet the illistrations are so awful, not one part of the illusion is believeable. I truly hope you delete this garbage from the website and we can forget this ever happened. I am very disapointed. Ive seen illusions on this website that i thought were bad but i understnad the importance they play on your website and the variety you try to accomplish as well as originality and well illustrated illusions. This however was something that a child could throw together and call and illusion. Absolute garbage. The illistrations were terrible, at best. i cant say enough bad things about this one.

    • bosco says:

      After reading your comment I too found something “incoherently stupid and meaningless”. For being so terrible, you sure used up a lot of time explaining why. As a matter of fact reading YOUR comment was the biggest waste of time I’ve ever experienced on this website.

  49. glp says:

    absolute garabge. Please just remove this disqustingly bad illusion as it just irritates me. Ive hand drawn many 3d shape changing illusions that i would never submit because i feel they have been over submitted or people just dont get them sometimes. Well this is garbagem and now i see you will take jsut about anything people send to you. Very disapointed. But now i feel my cube, box, shape changing illusions are masterful works of art. Compared to this, the dump i took this morning was a better illusion, it might have looked like a choclate hot dog if you tried hard enough.

    • jake says:

      Wow, that was harsh.

    • thebrainster says:

      anyone can draw thoes stupid cube morphing illusions, you just make a square with a square behind it and connect the corners and there you have it, i did it in 3rd grade, stop calling things junk if you can’t outmatch them

    • Thhp says:

      Keep your opinion to your self and stop acting like a 2 year old!

  50. ali says:

    wow, glp, tell us how you really feel.

    I don’t think that I would call the first version “maids” — they look more like little boys to me. The tramps in blue and yellow hats are okay, the tramp with the red hat doesn’t quite work somehow.

    • glp says:

      lol, i might have gone a little overboard. But seriously, anyone of us could conjur up a better illusion than this. I admit, the “tramps” appear to at least look as described. but the “maids” barley look like people. PS, why are their arms so damn skinny and they all have boy haircuts and football eye black underneath their eyes.

      The reason for this is because the author of this illusion was just too damn desprate and forced an illusion out of a crappy illustration. highly disapointed to see this.

  51. Natalie says:

    The illustration is by Peter Newell.

    Peter Newell
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Newell

    Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell (March 5, 1862 – January 15, 1924) was an American artist and author.

    A native of McDonough County, Illinois, Newell built a reputation in the 1880s and 1890s for his humorous drawings and poems, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Scribner’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Judge, and other publications. He later wrote and illustrated several popular children’s books, such as Topsys and Turvys (1893), a collection of poems and images which could be viewed upside-down or right-side-up; The Hole Book (1908), which had a literal hole at the center of each page to indicate the path of a bullet; and The Slant Book (1910), which took the shape of a rhomboid and told the story of a baby carriage careening down a hill.[1]

    Newell often illustrated the works of other authors, such as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, John Kendrick Bangs, and Lewis Carroll. He also created a comic strip serial, The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead, which debuted in the New York Herald in 1905. He died in Little Neck, New York in 1924.

    The illusion of maids and tramps appears on the cover of the book “Topsys & Turveys”

    http://www.amazon.com/Topsys-Turvys-No-1-Peter-Newell/dp/0804815518

    This illustration was made in the late 1800s or early 1900s, so “maids” and “tramps” meant something different then. Maids were unmarried women. Ever hear of the card game, “Old Maid?” A tramp is “a person who travels on foot from place to place, esp. a vagabond living on occasional Jobs or gifts of money or food.” Think “Lady and the Tramp.”

  52. GLP, it might not be the most brilliant illusion you’ve ever seen, but this massive sense of entitlement you’re displaying has somehow led you to think that abusing your host is an entirely appropriate way to behave.

    The rest of us, meanwhile, simply shrug our shoulders and wait for the next great post…

  53. …They look more like pez dispensers, the upside down pez dispensers. I have seen this done way better. Oh well, another day then!

  54. thebrainster says:

    lol it’s their heads sticking over the fence seeing their next victim…

  55. Hannah says:

    I don’t get this

  56. rowena says:

    what kind of stupid illusion is this?

  57. Jayr says:

    wow….I get it….Its really these guys looking over a fence with beards…thats sooo cool

  58. lasya says:

    superb wow i am puzzled!!!

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