Hexagons have become a fascination (read obsession) for me over the last few weeks and I'm constantly looking for books either from a fine art angle, a mathematics angle or a computer science and three-dimensional drawing angle that discuss the connection of hexagons to 3D space.
I keep finding glimpses, stumbling over new names and books. For example, Buckminster Fuller, who happened to invent the geodesic dome (see also). Friedrich Kittler, and a whole host of other material that leads into areas, some of which I'm yet to grasp and others that I'll probably never grasp.
The next thing that I've started pondering is hexagons and optical illusions. There must be a book out there somewhere, right? Well, it seems the world of quilting shares as much knowledge about how hexagons relate to the optical illusion of blocks as anyone. And provides yet another tangent to this hexagonal pondering.
Dreaming of the one book
What seems clear is that recorded knowledge is dispersed in this area, although I'm certain many artists utilise the relationship between the hexagon and the cube in their work. (Certainly Escher knew more than any artist [and probably mathematician] about tricks of perspective and would be a good place to start.)I hope one day that I'll stumble across a book that pieces together ideas about hexagons with the maths of vectors in a way that is at once creative and constructive for generating, and furthering the art of, 3D-digital worlds. Until then I'll just supply my best guesses at what works. And that's what I do here in the hope that it helps me and that it helps others too to become better at the manipulation and drawing of 3D objects.
Optical illusions
Take two hexagons, one inset inside the other:
They don't look like anything special, but add some shading and suddenly they turn into something different.
When I look at this shaded pair of hexagons I see three things. The first is a kind of corner seat or a cube with a cut-out. Second is a cube hanging in the corner of a ceiling. Third is a rotated cube stuck on the uppermost and frontmost vertex of a larger cube.
In other words it is a simply constructed optical illusion.
Building on the illusion
If we were to extend the corner seat to look more seat-like then first of all we'd choose more seat-like colours.
After that we'd lengthen it and add legs of some kind and position it in context to add further to its believability. I'm not going to walk through the whole thing here, but hope that you can from the basic extension shown here imagine where you might go next.
Moving on to that box in the corner. It reminded me of a speed camera, so let's follow up on that too.
A few quick adjustments and to me it does start to look speed camera-like. Quite looming and dramatic in actual fact. And I can say that because it was the hexagon that did the work, not me.
Final thoughts
Optical illusions are of interest because there's the possibility they might be entry points into drawing multiple objects from one source image through their duplicity and trickery. The thesis being that a 3D-illusion tricks the mind and is at the same time a fork, or even a roundabout, for the discovery of images.I'll keep this thought in mind and see if there are other optical illusions that I can run with. Join me for the journey if you like, even better contribute knowledge. I'm all ears.
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