Escher’s Famous Drawings

I covered many famous drawings and woodcuts done by Netherlands’s celebrity – M.C Escher. If you missed it somehow, aside being mathematician, he was one of the world’s most famous graphic artists. You may recall posts showing his Ascending and Descending, Moebious ring, his famous impossible waterfall and off course, one of his best works – Relativity. I even have Escher Style category in my sidebar, where I place illusions done by artists who were inspired by Escher and tried not to imitate him, but celebrate his works through their imitations. But what I realized, is that I never made a post where I placed his other famous works and show them to you. Thanks to reader called Kevin, and his submission, I was triggered to write this. If you open this article, you will see many of his morphing wood-carvings and drawings that are unbelievable. It’s hard for me to explain them, since they have so much hidden meanings and metaphors. How did you understand them? Which one did you like the most. Please share! For example, in the third one, the lighter gray birds morph into the light of day on the left, where the darker birds change into the night sky on the right.





36 Replies to “Escher’s Famous Drawings”

  1. there was a very cool program we used to use in elementary school that made these sort of designs. I wonder if anyone knows what its called and if its still available.

  2. i love design that stretches consciousness (spelling?) and bends normal reality. makes you think about what you take for granted and value the wonder of life. optical illusions and kinetic art are great. learn all about it if you want to become an artist of accomplishment. love tom peace warriors

  3. hey anonymous….. that program your talking about… i used one at my grade school too, ours was called TESELMANIA (sp?) sound framilliar?

  4. in the second piCture are they dancing tOgether Or just supposed to Look like tht
    (read all capital letters)

  5. Escher wasn’t a mathematician, he was just a graphic artist with a lot of imagination. In fact he himself couldn’t explain the math behind his sketches. He just thought he did something that looked cool. Explaining the math was done by real mathematicians. Another fun fact is that Escher didn’t make his drawings with the use of a computer. He etched them in copper or he made woodcuts. They didn’t have computers yet. So the coloured picture you see was printed using four (red, yellow, blue and black) overlapping woodcuts which had to line up exactely to the milimeter. They would then be printed one after the other each with it’s own colour on the same piece of paper.

  6. acutally its called testalations (didn’t spell right) or at least thats what it was called in my elemetary

  7. OMG these are so great. I love how he draws these so beautifuly keep up the fantastic work on your site because this site rocks.

  8. i love escher! reminds me of when i was a kid. that was the ONLY “coffee table” book my mom had! i use to take it to school with me to use the copier so i could color the images. wish i knew where those were now.

  9. Thank you for creating this site. The other day I was browsing through a book that contained optical illusion drawings and I wanted to learn more about the subject. As I was browsing on the web I found this site, to my good fortune!

  10. We used a program at school called “Tesselation Exploration”, and it let you create your own shapes, then the computer would make a tesselation out of it.

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