Hand Drawn Pencil Mazes

Jan 24, 2021
5 min read

Updated: Aug 8

I've Been Making Paths Since I Was a Kid

I started drawing mazes when I was about six years old. Like a lot of things I became interested in as a kid, I didn't just make one or two and move on. I kept drawing them.

I spent a fair amount of my school years with a pencil in my hand, filling paper with paths when I probably should have been paying attention to something else. I liked figuring out how to make a route wind through a limited space, creating choices, dead ends and distractions while still leaving one continuous path from beginning to end.

That fascination with paths never really went away.

In my twenties, I began taking these hand drawn pencil mazes much further. Instead of drawing a maze simply as a maze, I started using the paths themselves to create pictures. Animals, landscapes, fantasy scenes, familiar objects and other images became the framework for increasingly complicated hand-drawn mazes.

I hoped at the time that I might be able to sell them. That plan didn't exactly turn into a commercial empire. Over the years I had one customer, a store called Coolest Toys on Earth in Ohio.

But I kept making them because I enjoyed the challenge.

How I Make Hand Drawn Pencil Mazes

Each maze begins with an image I want to recreate. I establish the basic shapes and proportions on paper and then begin filling the image and surrounding space with maze paths using a .5 mm mechanical pencil.

The maze isn't simply drawn over a finished picture. The paths themselves become part of the image.

As I work, I use the direction and density of the lines to help define shapes, boundaries and details while simultaneously building a functioning maze. The challenge is keeping the underlying picture recognizable without losing sight of the fact that someone still needs to be able to navigate from START to END.

Multiple paths were a big part of how I drew these. I was always splitting the path, giving the person solving the maze another choice of which direction to take. That made it surprisingly difficult while drawing to keep track of which route was the “hero” path—the one that would eventually make it all the way to the end.

But I didn't need to remember every turn. As the maze grew, I knew there was still a continuous route through it. My job was to keep building, splitting and reconnecting paths without accidentally closing off that route.

I don't use a computer to generate the maze or calculate the solution. I build the paths myself, one section at a time.

Like much of my work, I don't have every inch planned before I begin. I establish where I'm going and then solve the problems that appear along the way.

A finished drawing generally takes me 8–10 hours just to draw by hand.

And that's only the beginning.

Watch a Maze Being Drawn

The video below is a time-lapse of me drawing my USA flag and map maze. It condenses hours of pencil work into a few minutes and gives a much better sense of how the paths develop across the page.

I don't begin with a computer-generated maze and trace it. I work my way through the drawing section by section, creating the paths by hand and fitting them around the image as I go.

https://youtu.be/_OlEHy1t5TA

Finding the Mistakes

Once the pencil drawing is finished, I scan it into the computer and bring the black-and-white image into Photoshop.

Then I inspect the entire maze.

This can take another eight hours.

I zoom in and work my way through the drawing looking for open paths, accidental dead ends, unfinished sections and poor line joins. With thousands of small hand-drawn lines packed together, a tiny opening or misplaced connection can change the way an entire section of the maze works.

It's a lot like testing something mechanical: making it is one part of the job; making sure it actually works is another.

I correct those problems until I'm satisfied that the maze functions the way I intended.

Drawing in Real Time

Time-lapse makes the process look much faster than it really is. These videos show portions of the drawing at normal speed. This is closer to what making one of these actually looks like: one small section and one decision at a time.

https://youtu.be/mYcTvMHY29Q

Adding the Color

After the black-and-white maze has been checked and cleaned up, I spend another few hours adding color in Photoshop.

Originally, I tried drawing the mazes with colored mechanical pencils. I liked the idea of producing the entire finished piece by hand, but it had two major drawbacks. The available colors were limited, and once I put a colored line on the paper, there was no going back.

Working digitally after completing the original pencil drawing gave me much more control. I could experiment with colors, make corrections and use the color to bring the underlying image forward without sacrificing the hand-drawn maze.

By the time one is finished, a single maze can represent roughly 20 hours of drawing, checking, correcting and coloring.

From Pencil Paths to Steel Tracks

Looking at these mazes now, the connection to my rolling ball sculptures seems obvious.

I've been making paths for most of my life.

In a maze, I create a path across a two-dimensional sheet of paper. In a rolling ball sculpture, I create a physical path through three-dimensional space.

With a maze, I'm deciding where a person can travel with their eyes and pencil. With a rolling ball sculpture, I'm deciding where a ball can travel under the influence of gravity.

Both involve intersections, changes in direction, choices and split paths. In the mazes, I was constantly giving the solver another route to choose. In my rolling ball sculptures, track switches do much the same thing, sending balls onto different routes through the sculpture.

I don't completely map out either one before I begin. I build a section, see where it leads, and let that suggest what should happen next. Eventually hundreds of individual decisions become one continuous path.

The medium changed from graphite on paper to TIG-welded stainless steel, but apparently my fascination with figuring out how to get from here to there never changed very much.

Someone Had to Solve One

I draw the mazes. I don't solve them.

Fortunately, someone else was willing to do that part. My dragon maze was featured on Puzzle Prime, where they worked out and published the solution.

If you'd like to see what one of these looks like when someone actually finds the path through thousands of hand-drawn lines, you can see the solved dragon maze on Puzzle Prime.

The Maze Collection

Over time, I completed 18 of these hand-drawn mazes, covering everything from animals and landscapes to fantasy, science fiction and abstract designs.

Each presented a different problem. Some images naturally created shapes and boundaries for the maze to follow. Others required me to figure out how to suggest texture, depth and recognizable details using thousands of interconnected lines while preserving a working route through the entire piece.

What started when I was six years old as drawing little mazes on paper eventually became this collection.

Years later, I would find myself doing something surprisingly similar in my workshop—only now the paths are made from stainless steel and instead of a pencil finding its way through them, I send a ball.

Either way, I'm still making paths.