Monday, December 19, 2022

Checkerboard Illusion

I painted this checkerboard using the exact same gray mixture for the dark square in the light area (A) as I did for the light square in the shadow (B).

 Why do the tones seem so different? 

 1. They have soft edges, and soft edges usually belong to shadows. 

 2. Those edges are parallel, and cast shadows from the sun on flat surface are parallel. 

 3. The tones of adjacent colored squares shift gradually in value to an equal degree, just the way shadows do.

at

2 comments:

  1. squeenDecember 20, 2022 at 8:48 AM

    Wow. Powerful illusion. I am not sure I understand your three points. It would help if the figure was annotated to highlight what precisely each one means.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ashokDecember 22, 2022 at 9:06 AM

    Interesting optical study

    ReplyDelete

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