A-Maze-ing!

My experiments with the trapezoidal prints on the weekend reminded me of an old passion I used that have for drawing mazes. The trapezoid prints were all narrow, straight channels and as I carved them I kept thinking about how cool it would be to create a labyrinth print. I started drawing mazes in high school to avoid doing actual math equations on my graph paper, and while creating mazes might not have helped me on any of my math exams, it certainly paid off tonight when I made my first attempt at designing one on a big 5x7 lino block.

First, I mapped out a very tiny grid.


Then I traced out the correct path as well as a few phantom ones to give the maze some structure. After shading in most of the correct path, I think started filling in the dead ends, erasing in certain places to ensure that I left lots of wrong options, bad turns, and dead ends.


It took me a little while to remember some of the techniques I used to use to fill in tricky spots (a much harder task than I originally anticipated), but then end result looks pretty cool. So cool, in fact, that for the time being I'm officially going to list this as Number 25 - Experiment with one large-scale lino block print.


Now all I have to do is carve it!