M.C. Escher—that's my favorite MC....

"M.C. Escher—that's my favorite MC" Weird Al Yankovic "White & Nerdy"2006.

Well not really..., but lately I've come appreciate some of MC Escher's more graphic work, so I guess I'm guilty.

Two of my favorite Escher's.


About a year or so ago I used his technique of repetitive interlocking positive and negative space to solve a conceptual problem for Money magazine, and once you start something....

The top image is a full page for Billboard magazine. Art direction by Christine Bower. The subject was the steady decline of the music industry for a special decade wrap-up. The working headline was "Down, But Not Out".

Here's some of the roughs I sent, but the editors decided they really wanted arrows going up and down. Hmmm, how to save that?

Crossed my fingers and sent in this. They went for it, which was lucky for me because it took well over a dozen sketches of puzzling just to see if it would even work as a rough.

Preliminary drawing.

Detail, I wanted the good "up" times of the industry to feel golden, so I tried to make it feel like gold leaf.

Some other Escher riffs I've done in the past year or so. For Money, John Hopkins and TIME.

It's fun thing to try, but I don't see how Escher spent a lifetime doing it without going cross-eyed.