One of my favorite optical illusionists is Akiyoshi Kitaoka -  a professor psychology in Japan. He extensively studies and creates visual illusions of many shapes and forms, including colour, motion and geometric illusions. He has created 10 books on the subject and you can also view his work on his website.

Colour illusion – the centre squares may appear yellow toned – in fact they are grey…

I’ve gathered a collection of smaller paper cuttings in my travels – mostly Chinese, they feature everything from wedding prosperity symbols, to Chairman Mao to a highway scene full of cars and power pylons and planes overhead.

Artist Aoyama Hina is from Japan and now resides in Paris – like the other artists featured she explores culture and symbolism – traditional of this artform and applies it in a modern context.

Bovey Lee defines what she does as “drawing with a knife”  she uses digital technology to create her compositions which she then cuts out by hand.  She describes Power, sacrifice, and survival as being the underlying narrative to her work – combining traditional and delicate techniques with contemporary images and symbolism of modern destruction and decay – she creates a subversive and paradoxical message in her work.

On a lighter note Ting Yu Wang has fun with fashion creating false paper eyelashes.

I have an ongoing fascination with paper art – Origami and paper cutting especially.  The geometry and dimensionality that these artists create is incredible.

I came across this artist recently Jen Stark who does amazing things with coloured paper and a scalpel – sort of 3 dimensional op art – more on her website.

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Brigid

I’m a visual hoarder of sorts – once it was piles of magazines but these days they have been pretty much replaced by files of images, links and screen shots – I get inspiration from everywhere, nature, fashion, art,  urban and vernacular architecture.

I wish I had taken note of the graphic artist who created the graphic image above – his technique using graduated colours and facets give his work quite retro /deco feel…  Looks like something that might be in the Chrysler Building lobby.

I’m pretty obsessed with urban building and the patterns they create, I’m collecting all sorts of images for a graphic fabric design I am working on – these images were entries in the minicreative competition