It has been almost three years since I released Mazes Escher Would Like and after that book I did not expect to do another. There are so many maze books available that it is difficult to be seen. Also, the software I use is old and no longer runs on currently-available computers. And yet for some reason that I do not fully understand, in April of 2021 I decided to do one more.
As I was sorthing through old documents on my computer, I stumbled on an old story I had written. I thought was funny and decided to illustrate it with mazes. Most of the mazes I used were old designs, but I did develop over twenty new maze designs for this book.
Yes, I tessellated toilets and made a maze from the pattern. Below is another tessellation pattern I used.
The above maze would be trivial if displayed in a friendly typeface but it is one of the most difficult mazes in the book because it is so hard to follow the little passages that connect. It also posed a challenge for the way I construct mazes because the basic pattern is a grid of diamonds, so everything connects diagonally.
The shape used above was also a challenge for my maze construction set. The basic shape is triangular, with one orientation adjacent to two above and the other with two below. I treated it as a maze of triangles and used two typefaces to render it.
Not everything is tessellation based. I used foot prints to form the walls of a maze that allows passages up and down, right and left, and diagonally.
The book is Grandpa's Amazing Tale: A Book of Mazes. It uses mazes to illustrate a silly story told by a grandparent to a granddaughter and involves time travel and dinosaurs, so it is both a story book and a puzzle book. It is intended for children in early elementary school.
