Who doesn’t love a good illusion? We’re winding down 2011 with some of the most creative projects we posted on this year. Some of the best art and photography we featured involved illusions, works that distorted our senses and frazzled our brains, making us do a welcome double-take. From incredible 3D chalk drawings to immersive installations, these were our favorite illusions in 2011.
Make sure to click through each image to learn more.
1. 3D Grass Globe at Paris City Hall
Artist Franois Abelanet played tricks on our eyes, making us believe there is a three-dimensional grass globe sitting right in the middle of Paris’ City Hall. When viewed at different angles, however, the illusion quickly fell apart.
2. The Infinity Room
With this immersive installation, French artist Serge Salat invited visitors to take a journey through endless layers of space, decked out with cubic shapes, panels of mirrors, shifting lights and music. Salat used mirrors as optical illusions, exploding a single room into spatial infinity.
3. 3D Lego Chalk Drawing
Created for the Sarasota Chalk Festival in Florida, this amazing mashup of Legos and Terracotta warriors was magnificent in every sense of the word. Notice that at certain angles, the piece looked completely distorted and almost completely unrecognizable.
4. Issey Miyake’s Blue Chair Illusion
Peek inside the windows of the Issey Miyake store in Tokyo, and you’ll think you’re looking at a room full of blue chairs. But that’s where you’d be wrong. The white floor only has blue chair backs popping out of the floor, the rest of the chair, the seats and legs, had been painted on the ground!
5. Motivational Anamorphic Tape
Designer Stephen Doyle of Doyle Partners created these amazing anamorphic tape installations of character traits at two New York City schools for the article What if the Secret to Success is Failure? in The New York Times Magazine.
6. Record-Breaking 3D Street Mural
London-based street art duo ‘3D Joe and Max’ teamed up with Reebok CrossFit to create the world’s biggest 3D street artwork to date. Located at London’s Canary Warf, the large piece was nearly 350 ft long and measured 9,601 square feet.
7. Multidirectional Face Illusions
Using his Samsung L100 digital camera and Photoshop, Venezuela-based student Jess Gonzlez Rodrguez mixed layers to create some of the trippiest face illusions we’d seen in a very long time.
8. M&Ms Trapped in Water Drops
How did Flickr user Northwest dad create this sweet image of water drop M&Ms? Was it though Photoshop? Nope. He actually used a pretty clever camera setup.
9. Stunning Cinemagraphs
Jamie Beck and her partner Kevin Burg used a “cinemagraph” technique where they combine still photographs and video to create these magnificent mini films.
10. Mud Makes Man Appear
31-year-old Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi created an incredibly interesting photographic series about the struggle of an artist. First, though, you may be asking yourself this question: “How did the photographer achieve this strange, sculpture-like illusion?”
Which of these illusions did you enjoy the most?