This short piece was used to describe a picture I used as the 'Center Fold' illustration in the July 1998 Commodore MaiLink newsletter. I have included a geoPaint version of this page on the BTDISK1.D64 disk image along with the article in geoWrite format. The GeoPaint image was created by printing the geoPublish page to disk using the Paint Pages printer driver. While the very bottom of the page has been cut-off due to the shorter page length of GeoPaint you will still get the main point of the article and can see the way the image was re-sized. Of course, geoPaint does not do justice to the picture the way the PostScript Laser did.

Waterfall

One of the great things about using a PostScript Laser and geoPublish is the ability to re-size graphics without a loss of quality. This original picture was a full-page geoPaint image on a Dick Estel disk. ScrapCan would only cut out the image halfway through the bottom border - thereby cutting the title in half. I editted the file in geoPaint to fix this by making the top border closer to the tops of the towers. From there I used Paint Rotate to turn the picture upside-down. Now I could use ScrapCan to capture the entire image - title and all.

I pasted this scrap, lined up at the bottom of an empty geoPaint file, with ScrapCan and then rotated it right side up again with Paint Rotate. One more copy with ScrapCan gave me the image I wanted. This was pasted into geoPublish and re-sized as you see it here.

To make this even better the original artist, Maurits Cornelis (M.C.)  Escher, is one of my favorites for his wonderful artistic illusions. I have sent Fred a demo file of this image with running water and a spinning Millwheel for inclusion on the MaiLink disk this month.

Escher (1898 - 1972) learned graphic techniques in school and spent many years creating amazing pieces of work featuring a division of planes (repeating the same, or different, images to fill a given space). He later became interested in the field of mathematics and that is where this picture falls (pun intended).

If you look at the picture quickly, all of it seems perfectly normal. Closer inspection leads to the discovery of three impossible triangles. The water flows out from the wheel and down a sloped channel with a couple of 90o turns and then falls from directly above the start. The Towers are beside and behind each other as well as above and at the same height. Great trickery! If this interests you, check your library for books of his work. 