Have you ever looked at a picture thatmakes your brain just wanna give up? Chances are you were looking at a visualillusion, an image that plays with our mind’s perception of reality. And one of the most famous visual illusionartists of them all was MC Escher.

       You may not have heard that name before,but you’ve definitely seen hiswork. MC Escher is responsible for some of the most iconic and eye breakingillusions. Stuff that makes you stare for hours navigating the twists and turnsof his art until you end up right where you started. Ever seen a picture ofpeople on a circular staircase? Everybody’s walking upstairs but nobody seems to be getting any higher. That’s Escher work. His visual art puzzles make appearances in everythingfrom movies, to anime, to video games.

       And now, thanks to the phenomenal talent ofS_pinney and H2CO3, Escher’s work has cometo Minecraft in all of it’s blocky,mind-bendy glory. If you’re looking atthese images going what? huh? How did they do this? - don’t worry! We’ve got someanswers for you straight from the builders themselves.

       S_pinney and H2CO3  (or Carbonic Acid for you chemistry loversout there) are German university students that like to spend their free timebuilding in Minecraft. S_pinney found Minecraft through a friend and H2CO3stumbled upon the game by accident.

  “We both enjoy organic and oversized building the most,” s_pinney says, when we ask what they liked most about playing Minecraft. “Especially the creative aspect. The coloring and forming stuff.”

       When they’re not melting our eyeballs with their fantastic build of Escher'sfamous Relativity work, they like to tinker with redstone contraptions andcommand block builds.

       It’s one thing to create powered rails with redstone and write simplecode with command blocks, but it’s another thingentirely to recreate visual illusions from scratch.

  “When we build stuff, weare often searching for cool images,” explains S_pinney. “And because weare getting more and more into abstract, modern art, we stumbled across MCEscher. This painting seemed, as we saw it, a 2D picture, impossible torecreate in 3D Minecraft. That’s probably whywe chose to try it.”

       Attraction to the impossible worked for these two, expertly recreating Escher’s illusion in the Minecraft we know and love. But it took a lot of work to make this look good, and the difficulties weren’t what you’d expect.

  “By far the mostchallenging thing about this project was the coloring of the walls," saysS_pinney. "It was a lot of trial and error. They shouldn’t be too noisy, but also not too pale. Getting horizontal texturesin it was extraordinarily difficult because the walls aren’t going along one axis, but in every direction."

       In the end, they managed to overcome their painting issues by working together as a team. “When we start a project, we both have stuff we are more comfortable with than the other,” explains S_pinney. “I lay out the walls, putting in the stairs and railings while H2CO3 works on the humans.”

       So S_pinney builds the space, and H2CO3builds the people. But they haven’t finished withtheir phenomenal builds or their trippy, mind blowing themes. When we askedwhat’s next, S_pinney hadthis to say:

  “We’ve wanted to create an animation in Minecraft for a long time. Wefound a stunning video that shows an alchemist machine burning the memories ofits creator to convert metal into gold. The pictures, idea, and execution wereso crazy cool that we are trying to create something similar in the future. Butwe know it’s going to be a realchallenge.”

       I bet after seeing what they’re capable of, you’re lookingforward to seeing them overcome this challenge too. And if you’re interested in building your own illusions?

  “Working together with afriend makes it so much easier to stay focused on a project,” S_pinney advises. “You can teacheach other stuff and also complement each other. Join a team where you feelmost comfortable with the members. Minecraft can be a great place to find newfriends and to (re)create great art.”