Sunday, October 17, 2010

The Impossible Cube of MC Escher

How to draw MC Escher's Impossible Cube

 

Great video for MC Escher fans. I did this with 6th grade, after we finished the lesson on tessellations. They love this, for the next two weeks they are drawing these all the time and tormenting younger siblings by drawing quickly and confusing them. I have the younger siblings being tormented asking me how do you draw that, I just tell them when they get into 6th grade they will learn how to.

We look at this drawing

I don’t tell them much in the beginning but that this is known as the impossible cube. At first they think it’s a regular cube until someone notices the irregularity.

I show the video

1. Run it through the first time having the class watch it.

2. Run it through the second time and stop at each step:

Students have a direction sheet from wiki how

 http://www.wikihow.com/Draw-an-Impossible-Cube

They usually get it and then create several, color, cut out and mount onto construction paper.

Examples

After learning to drawing the cube I show them this website of a woodworker whose objective s to create 3-D  sculptures of Escher’s art. One side looks like the drawing, then he shows how it needs warped on the other side of the shape to create it.

http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gershon/EscherForReal/

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