MazeToons is now in its fifth year! My style and technique has evolved a lot since then. I’ve been drawing all my life and even after over 40 years I’m still learning.
I often look back on older drawings and mazes and don’t like them very much. Every now and then I will revisit a drawing and “update” it. This viking maze was one of the very earliest MazeToons:
My mazes now are more grounded in creating a scene, so the characters tend to be standing on something rather than just free floating components of the maze. I always struggled with giving my characters “weight”. I’ve gotten better but still have more to learn. The coloring is probably the biggest change as I now have a better handle on shading. The palette is also much richer. Originally I was worried that if I used colors that were too dark they would make the maze unsolvable when they printed. After seeing the mazes in print I discovered my worries were unfounded. So I am now much more liberal in the use of rich saturated colors. The line work is also a bit more crisp and clean. This is a result of me drawing directly on my Wacom tablet rather than drawing with a pen and scanning the drawings in. I stopped using a splash panel and instead just work around the logo in my mazes. I just wanted that extra real estate for maze work.
I am much happier with the work I am doing today then when I started out. But I also recognize that my favorite drawing is always- “The next one.”
A bonus image! One of my GoComics fans asked if that viking was me dressed as a viking? The answer is no, but. Here I am dressed as a viking for a cosplay karaoke party! I was dressed as Odin! So while I wasn’t the model for the maze, I could have been!
