Bird Maze

Written 54-F24 [2022-12-31], Edited 54-J03 [2023-04-01]

For the first time in many years, I have finished drawing a maze. The full-size maze image is available here, a compressed version is below.

Image credit: Ratan Abraham Varghese

The start (S) is at the tip of the beak, and the finish (F) is on the big toe. Yes, this maze does have a solution. But I’ll be keeping that to myself.

Behind the Screen

This maze is based on a sad and gruesome photo I took a long time ago. I was walking around the University of Waterloo dorms and looked down to see a tiny dead bird, smaller even than my toe. It was featherless, suggesting that it might have been a baby bird too young to fend for itself. The avian remains were tragic, gross but also deeply fascinating so I photographed them. Instead of burying the creature, I just went ahead with my walk as if nothing had happened. When I returned hours later, the dead bird was gone - the photo was all I had. The photo of the actual bird corpse is here if you dare to look at it.

Probably the toughest part of drawing the maze was right at the beginning, when I was trying to scale up all the features of the tiny real bird to fill my page. I’m not a professional artist, only an amateur and as such I am terrible at drawing things with the correct proportions. To work around this weakness, I took thirty-eight measurements of the photo on my phone screen before sketching out the bird’s body. Hopefully, now that I am out of University, I can spend some time learning to draw objects proportionally before starting my next maze.

The actual process of filling the image with maze paths was relatively easy. It requires very little skill, but a lot of patience. The only reason this maze took so long was that it was a low priority task. The whole thing could have easily been done in a month or less if it were my full time job.

That said, I did make several mistakes, partly due to inattention, and partly due to pausing work on the maze for months or years at a time. On the bird’s head, the area that would have been the bird’s eyes (if the bird ever had eyes) was drawn in two colors, simply because I picked the wrong pen one day. The background gravel ended up being two colors for a similar reason. The gravel design was initially supposed to have more blank circles and fewer twisty paths. Finally the direction of lines on the bird’s leg joints was intended to be vertical instead of horizontal. Perhaps all these minor issues could have been avoided by writing down a style guide at the start, and committing to it: I could not remember all these little plans over the course of weeks, let alone years.

Kaleidoscope

Much like one of my older mazes from high school, I tried turning this one into a fractal pattern that I could use as a desktop background. In high school I used the Kaleidoscope filter in an application named Core Image Fun House: that application was Mac-specific and also, is no longer supported. But the same effect is available in GIMP, and also called Kaleidoscope. Once again, the full-size kaleidoscope image is available here, and a compressed version is below.

Image credit: Ratan Abraham Varghese