Thaumatropes

One of the earliest and most popular is on of a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other. When spun it looks like the bird is in the cage. The GIF below is from the film Oz the Great and Powerful.

When creating my own I wanted to make it quite individual. I started searching keywords like 'amazing' and 'impressive' with thaumatropes and found this:

The artist who created this is called David 'Meggs' Hooke. His style is very graffiti based and a lot of his subjects are based on pop culture and fantasy creatures. For this piece he painted half of the skull on one side and the other half on the other. When the disk is spun it creates a whole one.

This really inspires me because I feel that I could use a skull with an image of a model so that when it is spun they would fuse into one and look similar to that of the front cover of the Final Destination DVD cases.















I first took an image of my friend and I found an image online of a skull by 'yungtyrant' on Wikia.

 To prepare the portrait I circle cropped the image.

 And deleted the unnecessary parts.

I then used a cooling filter to make the background whiter and equalize the colour tones on the models face.

I placed both the images on a word document and made sure that the eyes nose and mouth lined up.

After printing and cutting the portrait out I realised I had to line the skull in the same position that the face is. so I put the face behind the skull and placed them on a window so I could see through. I marked around the skull where the edge of the circle was and cut that out.

One of the images has to be upside down to the other so that that when it is spun horizontally they are the same way up. I finished by hole punching the pictures and a piece of card in the middle and tied on some string.

I feel that this works quite well, the skull is off by about 2mm but I dont think that this is very noticeable. I enjoyed making it and I found it quite easy. However I feel that it would work a lot better if the portrait was black and white and had a filter attached to make it look similar to the skull. This might make them blend together easier as it is spun.