Most maze artist like to keep their designs symmetrical. It is more pleasing to the eye and harkens back to traditional labyrinth construction. The left side and the right side should be equally balanced. My mazes are NEVER perfectly symmetrical. I find mazes more challenging if they are not. I like that the imagery is slightly unsettling. If you look at my abstract mazes you will see they are unbalanced, they seem haphazardly put together with the pieces not always fitting in a logical way. They have a discombobulating depth to them but it’s inconsistent. The laws of perspective of off, the shadows cast in unusual ways, and most important never a truly straight line. I don’t use rulers or a straight edge. I view straight lines as unnatural. My work clearly inhabits a cartoon world’s sensibility or lack of sensibility I suppose.
Even when drawing figurative mazes with a central character I keep the left and right side of the maze different. So there may be a central focus, and that character may possess some symmetry but overall the maze is still slightly off.
It is difficult to make such small mazes challenging, especially when you have to dedicate a portion of the space to the illustration. So a discomforting disregard for the normal rules of maze making is one of my tricks.
