Met a maze maker…
You’ll be lost, then you’ll find your way out. But don’t ask Matthew Kershaw how. Although he designs them, he’s not always sure he can find his way out.
Matthew loved creating mazes as a kid and never grew out of it. “I used to like to doodle in my notebook when I was bored in classes at primary school (around Grade 5), and my maze drawing began to evolve from then. After a few months the drawings became quite intricate and I continued to draw them for about a year. I rediscovered this skill about three years ago and I have been drawing mazes again ever since.”
Often working in both a meditative and extremely focused state when freehanding, he visualizes a typical route a person would take and then inserts intertwining paths, dead ends and winding loops to confuse and stump players.
Taking approximately an hour to complete, he labels his puzzles on the complex to difficult scale with some almost covering an entire A4 page. “In the future I plan to draw A3 size mazes and even larger,” he says. “I can solve all my mazes soon after completing them but after some time I go back to them to try and I forget the precise way. So they can be pretty challenging even for the maze creator!”
Matthew sees his creations more than mazes but pieces of art and have sold some of his work at art and crafts markets in Vietnam. “In the near future I plan to produce a maze book with 20 solvable designs, along with ornamental but also functional mazes on large framed color prints, coffee mugs and t-shirts.”
Illustrations by Matthew Kershaw. More of Matthew’s mazes can be found at: mazeworld.wix.com/amazeing
