#70 - Moss and Lungwort 3
- My third maze of the shelter at home era is also my third maze on the theme of Moss and Lungwort.
This maze is drawn from the same sample of moss and lungwort that fell on the pathway between the cottage and the big yurt last Fall. In dry weather, it desiccates into a brown crumpled mass. When it gets wet, it seems to instantly transform back into life taking on vibrant green/yellow/orange/brown textures.
Unlike artists using traditional physical tools like paint brushes or pens, I live in fear that my digital tools will suddenly stop working or be taken away from me. In the era of automatic software updates and large companies acquiring and killing the products of small companies, I have no faith that key tools in my process today will work tomorrow. I do not trust the software from companies that try to push me into "cloud" apps. I'm frowning at you, Google, Apple, Adobe, and AutoDesk.
I am fortunate that I am familiar with Linux. I can find many software tools for that OS that can substitute for untrustworthy mobile and Web apps with egregious license agreements. This maze reflects changes to my process where I've managed to eliminate Google and Adobe from my tool chain in favor of Gimp and Inkscape. Apple and AutoDesk will be harder to eliminate.
This maze is different from my others in a couple ways. It doesn't have the rounded corners that previous works got from using framing tools from Google's Snapseed. Yeah, I could have gotten Gimp to do that, but I decided to try square corners for once.
In most of my other mazes, I put the two entrances and the two exits in the upper right and lower left corners. On this maze, just to be different, I spread them to all four corners. This had interesting effects in planning and drawing the maze solutions. Without the crowding, I was freer to add more forward and backward blind deception paths. I suspect that this maze is more difficult than earlier mazes. I'll probably never know for sure because I've never known anyone to solve my mazes.
I'll probably return to rounded corners, but further explore changing the locations of the entrances and exits.