Fun with Maths and Art

If you are walking down the road and come across the following oddly stretched image,

you have an opportunity to see something remarkable, but only if you stand in that exact same spot! Here’s how…

Anamorphosis is a special case of perspective art where artists represent realistic three-dimensional (3D) views on two-dimensional (2D) surfaces. Ancient art often shows figures on the same plane varying in size by symbolic importance. Classical Greek and Roman artists realized they can make objects look smaller by drawing them closer.

They realized that the objective of perspective drawing could be achieved by a highly sophisticated form of art and a high level of precision used in the creation of these drawings by applying mathematical principles. In 1485, Leonardo Da Vinci created the first known anamorphic art by applying mathematical principles.

The same technique was later used by many other great artists of the 15th and 16th centuries to create masterpieces in the field of Anamorphosis. Hans Holby created a painting that was in a distorted shape but would appear like a human skull as the viewer approached from the side.

In order to understand how these techniques were deployed, let us first understand the principles of perspective drawing.

Imagine looking at a window, light bounces off the objects and into your eye intersecting the window along the way. Now imagine you can paint the image you see directly onto the window keeping only one eye open. The result would be indistinguishable from the actual view because the brain adds depth to the 2D picture. So basically perspective drawing is just a projection of a picture on a 2D plane.

Let’s say you want to make an Anamorphic sidewalk drawing. Suppose, you want to add a 3D image to an existing scene, imagine a window and draw whatever you want to add to the scene on the window. It should be in the same perspective as the rest of the scene. Once the drawing is complete you can use the projector to project the drawing on to the sidewalk.

The sidewalk drawing and the drawing on the window would be indistinguishable from the point of placing the projector. And the viewer would be tricked into believing that the drawing would be actually 3D.

This is how we can use mathematics and perspective drawing to open a whole new fascinating world.

– Shravani Naik