Mauritz Cornelis Escher was born in 1898 and died in 1972.

He lived in The Netherlands, but he traveled a lot through Europe, especially Italy, where he drew a lot of inspiration.

M.C. Escher

M.C. Escher wanted to study architecture (how to create buildings) but after only one week in school he decided to become a graphic artist instead.

He spent the rest of his life making lithographs, woodcuts, drawings in pencil and pen and ink.

Escher loved “optical illusion. An illusion is meant to trick your brain into believing something that isn’t real, because our eyes tell us it is. �This picture “looks” three dimensional because of the way Escher drew the cubes.

During his travels, he saw a lot of geometric and mathematical patterns that he sketched, and then incorporated into his artwork. He created a lot of these “Tessellations” or patterns that filled the space and repeated the positive and negative shapes

Today, we will be creating our own Tesselations like M. C. Escher. Here is an example! Our shapes can be very simple, so the “optical illusion” is easier to see.