Abecedary to color: W

Click here for a high-res, 

full-page printable to color in.

The last W on this page, and the fourth V* on the previous post, are from a fascinating genre, where the artist seems to follow the rules of perspective but doesn't.  Your brain knows the structures can't exist but your eye keeps trying to find a way.  And coloring the image in doesn't help make it any less impossible.  You have to let go of trying to make sense of the image and just admit that you can be baffled.  

*That V is made of children's blocks to heighten the riddle.  (If you look carefully, you'll find that each picture shows something that starts with V.)


Enjoy the mental puzzles without worrying about solutions.  As R. Crumb said in one of his cartoons, "It's just ink on paper, folks!"  

The idea of impossible letters was first explored by type designers who were inspired by the work of M C Escher, a one-of-a-kind artist who changed forever the way people look at positive and negative space.  In the first half of the 20th century, he pioneered the study of tessellation, perspective, and the depiction of impossible objects. His work prefigured the concepts of fractals and forced perspective. 
Enjoy this excursion into the third dimension--and beyond.