Wednesday - The Hague and Escher

On Wednesday we took a train to The Hague to go see the Escher museum.  It's in an old royal palace, so the rooms are fun, and the chandeliers are fantastic.  Downstairs they have Escher's older work, which is the same drawing style, but mostly landscapes, and none of the fun tricks with perspective or illusions.

The second floor has what you might call classic Escher: the metamorphoses and impossible buildings, and hands drawing each other.  All of which is copyright, obviously.

But our favourite bit was the top floor with all the interactive stuff. The cube is painted on the walls - some around the doorway, some in the room behind.

They've also got a hemispherical mirror, and we had fun photographing each other from different angles.

Best of all was the room-within-a-room with trick perspective.  The left hand side is actually smaller and closer to the camera. You have to pay extra for a photo, and I usually regret paying for that sort of extra, but we all love this.

Our son was getting obsessed by video games, so over the Christmas break we insisted that he was only allowed limited time on the computer.

He promptly started drawing - of characters and scenes from his favourite games. But the first few were good, and they're getting better and better. This is Hyper-Sonic and friends with the Chaos Emeralds. (Apparently in the game they're called emeralds whatever colour they are.)