Tricking the Eye

The second of our Easter Holiday Art Courses was all about creating illusions, led by artist, Karen Logan. We began by looking at Victorian thaumatropes for inspiration.

Thaumatrope

We then made thaumatropes of our own. We used themes like a robber behind bars and a tree and leaves to create the illusion of a single image when the thaumatrope was spun.

We then looked at another Victorian invention, the zoetrope, which showed how people started to think about animation.

A Zoetrope

We then made drawings for our own animations, working with 13 frames and thinking about the principles that we needed to follow. One of the most important was that action needs to begin and start in the same frame.

When the drawings were ready it was time to create our own zoetropes. We made them from wire, carboard, paper plates and string. They worked surprisingly well.

After lunch we created characters and events, and made puppets with moving parts to describe them.

And we rounded off a busy day of inventing, making and tricking the eye, with a series of our very own shadow puppet shows.