Architectural Elements Penrose Triangle - April 2018
Digital Art Photography Graphic Design
Megan K. Peterson

I work for a metals fabrication shop, creating custom content for our social media accounts. The above image was created for our April Fools social media campaign. Once posted on our Instagram, it generated a lot of debate and was picked up by a larger metals fabrication account sparking more discussion and earning over 20k likes! It has since been reposted on several other accounts and shared thousands of times.

The Penrose Triangle optical illusion was first created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934. It is possible to create this object by cutting the vertical piece of the triangle in just the right way to line up with the back piece from a specific perspective. However, to settle the debate, yes, the image I created is 100% Photoshop.

HOW IT WAS DONE: We set up a camera on a tripod and took an image of the background. We then placed a piece of steel tube on the table and rotated it, taking photos at every 15 degrees or so. We did the same with the perpendicular piece. This ensured we'd have at least a couple photos of the tube in angles I'd need to fit the pieces together and that all of the pieces were taken from the same lighting & perspective. I then corrected the images and started cutting the tube pieces out of their backgrounds. The foremost piece was the base, the vertical piece sat on top of that, and the right-side's angled piece was duplicated/elongated to overlap the vertical piece and connect with the foremost piece. Once I had solidified and healed all of the pieces together, I then took photos of the welds on a square I held at the same angles to be used in the piece. I cut those welds out, placed them where the seams would be, and added some scorch/rust marks to blend them. The shadows on the table are not artificial-- I simply cut out the shadows from the original images and placed them appropriately, which gave it a more realistic look in my opinion. Once I had completed the composition, I opened a .jpeg of the piece and bumped up the clarity to add more texture.