I've been a big fan of M.C. Escher's Art since I was a little kid. His impossible figures drawings are mindblowing and his tesselations are fantastic. In the last couple of months, I've actually done a couple of projects that involve his work.

The first I did on Thanksgiving break. I had become very interested in making jigsaw puzzles on my scroll saw and after doing a couple of interesting puzzles that I made by printing pictures I found online and gluing them to the piece to be cut, I decided that Escher's tesselations would make fantastic puzzles. The one I settled on making is called Mosaic II and is a very interesting piece that is made from 40 different animals that fit perfectly together. It is colored in such a way that dark pieces and light pieces only touch the other at "corners." For my version this isn't quite true because I left out the tongue of the snake because I didn't want it to be easy to break. It's a fun puzzle that takes people between a half hour and an hour if they have no prior knowledge of what the picture looks like.

The original Escher:




Initial outline cut on my scroll saw (The whole piece is about the size of a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper):



Well I've never tried wood burning before...but hey it looks like fun. I used wood burning tips on my soldering iron.



A few hours later!




Even later....Wood burning is finished!




The Finished Product after about sanding, staining, and coating with polyeurethane. The total project was about 10 hours worth of work:






The second project I did in the morning of one of my days off during Christmas break. It's a paper version of Escher's Relativity that is cut and folded out of one piece of paper and stays together using only tabs and no glue. The technique is called Origamic Architecture and at some point I will probably put up a post on all the different pieces I've copied using this technique. I found the diagram for Relativity on a flikr and you can download it here. Note: my version is mirrored from both what the diagram suggests and the original Escher piece. I "decided" to fold it the other direction.

The original Escher drawing:





The piece I made by downloading the diagram, printing it on a piece of paper, and then cutting and folding as indicated.



What Escher's would look like if it was mirrored like mine: