How to Draw Incredible Optical Illusions

A mind-blowing guide for the logical mind! Create your own optical illusions and amaze your friends once you’ve learned these techniques.

Gianni Sarcone dissects the most mystifying and magical illusions, revealing the logic behind their patterns and tiling, and explaining how they work. He delves into the importance of blank spaces, negative space, interferences, repetitive geometric textures, and more--all part of the palette an ＂op artist＂ uses to produce powerful illusions and visual surprises. Draw curves that diverge and converge, diamonds that vibrate and flicker, hypnotic spirals, ＂ghosts＂ and ambiguous figures, and other astonishing illusions. You’ll even learn how to produce the ＂impossible＂ perplexing images of things that could and should not exist in the real world--but can come straight out of your imagination to live on the page. And illustrating all the instructions are Sarcone’s own magnificent pieces. They include recent and revisited optical effects, plus demonstrations and tips for inspiration.

Gianni A. Sarcone is a passionate author, inventor and designer with more than twenty years of experience in the fields of visual creativity, recreational mathematics, and educational games.

His artworks and feature articles on educational topics and creative thinking are published and syndicated in magazines, newspapers, and books. Sarcone has written several books in English, French, German, and Italian on brain games, critical thinking, and on the mechanism of vision. He is cofounder, editor and webmaster of the Archimedes’ Lab Project, a consulting network of experts specializing in developing creativity.

Considered a leading authority on visual perception by academic institutions, Gianni A. Sarcone was a juror at the Third Annual ＂Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest＂ held in Sarasota, Florida (USA). His optical illusion project ’Mask of Love’ was named in the top ten best optical illusions in the ＂2011 Best Illusion of the Year Contest＂ held in Naples, Florida.