Mazes

Mazes are great. Amazing, in fact. Sorry.
Thing is, they can also have a decorative function, and when you go right back in history you find they always have, to the point where in garden design the puzzle element is absent and the formal design element is paramount.

I don't have a special aptitude for puzzles but I've always liked labyrinths. My imagination was spurred when I was at school, around 9 or 10, and a friend got into designing colourful maze puzzles on which he'd stick strips of paper which looped over and across, creating really interesting 3D mazes. While I never went down that route, it did get me thinking about experimenting with mazes. And this sort of thing below is what I wanted to do.



It's A3 size and the figures are 1/76. I made a frame for it with an acrylic front, so it hangs on the wall; but this shot shows the maze itself to better advantage. A lot of scrap material has been used, along with spare figures and bits and pieces from model railway layout work. Maybe you can see there's a gate at top left, which a couple of backpackers are just entering; some geese; and one of the two lost children inside the maze.

I was pleased with this and even had a half hearted attempt to sell it on eBay. It didn't take, but there were a few curious watchers. I don't mind too much. More will follow, and not just so that I can have a grouping on my wall. Design wise, I can see that although the maze itself is central, I've left most of the circumstantial interest out on the edges left and right. If nothing else I should have put a space in the middle with some sort of feature as a focal point. As a maze, it's obviously easy, but I would hope most people would get that that wasn't the point. No matter, I have several other ideas for mazes in this format, both vertical and look-down like this one. The only problem is that with all the detail, and the bespoke frame, they take an awful amount of time to make :(

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