A flat grid doesn’t have to stay flat, and there are two different ways to make it look otherwise. The first is shading alone: every cell in the hero image above stays exactly the same size and shape it always was, and the illusion of folding, stacking, or tilting in space comes entirely from value and color changes at certain seams — the eye reads those shifts as creases or turns even though the surface never actually changes. The second method, visible in several pieces below, goes further and actually distorts the grid itself: cells genuinely shrink, stretch, or rotate as they approach a center point, the way a fisheye lens compresses the edges of a photograph and magnifies the middle. That real warping is what produces the bulges, domes, and spiraling vortices in this set — a different mechanism from the flat, shaded illusions, even though both read as three-dimensional at a glance. It’s worth looking closely enough to tell which trick a given piece is actually using, since the two produce a similar effect through nearly opposite means: one keeps the structure rigid and lets color do the work, the other keeps the coloring simple and lets the structure itself bend.
