CHAPTER 3 | IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES

Impossible drawing figures are figures that cannot possibly exist in three dimensions. It is a form of optical illusion. The most famous example is the impossible triangle, originally drawn by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd as early as 1934. What is special is that he  had great difficulty as a child estimating dimensions and distances. In 1958, the triangle became famous as it was reinvented by the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose.

Exercise: Draw all three figures from the row you choose. The left figure is flat/geometric, the middle one is correct 3D and the right one is … impossible. An eraser is certainly not superfluous.

A special case is the devil’s (tuning) fork. If you cover the three circles, it suddenly has only two legs. Because of its ambiguous shape, it appeared on the cover of the comic magazine MAD in 1965. You can see from the double eyes of the laughing figure that he doesn’t understand anything either.

The following drawing of a candlestick is based on the devil’s fork. If you cover the three candle flames in the impossible figure on the right, the candlestick has only two legs.