It’s that time of year again. Baseball season starts March 30th. Maze of the week #65 was my attempt to celebrate that fact. It is a maze of the Guardian from the bridge that overlooks Progressive Field in Cleveland, Ohio. Specifically it is one of the Guardians of Traffic sculptures (1932). You can read about them in Cleveland Magazine or check out this short video about the name change:

Photo: flickr, Erick Drost

Guardians of Traffic bridge statues in Cleveland, Ohio — Guardians of Traffic

The Maze: One color. Not my best maze. I made this a few years ago and never used it (until now). I post it here to show you how some of my mazes get developed over time. This is NOT the final product.

Guardian of Traffic Maze — Bridge Guardian Maze

And now to look into my improved version:

Photo: This photo from flickr, and Heather McLaughlin, will become important.

Jacobs Field Cleveland OH — flickr, Heather McLaughlin, Jacobs Field

And now what I did to improve (hopefully) the maze and make it more interesting.

1. Colors changed - The initial maze was one color. I changed the overall color to be darker and added a secondary color. I also added shadows in many places.

2. Details added - I went back and found a better photo of the truck and added additional details to it. I added some new details to the face, added fingernails, etc. You can compare the mazes and find even more !

3. Extended the maze - I made the maze longer and extended it to the bottom of the page. The actual structure is very large and the previous “floating” version of the maze was not accurate. I also added the side panels that were missing from version 1.

4. Changed the Maze - I kept this an easy kids maze. I changed the non-core maze portion at the top and deleted the lower portion of the maze.

5. Added background - I wanted to try this as mixed media. I thought about doing a blue sky but the location of this bridge overlooks the baseball stadium, so I found the photo above to make this a mixed media maze !

6. Start and goal changed - I felt that this would look better by changing the arrows to an internal lettered start and goal.

7. Letter and branding moved - I moved the branding and lettering to the top of the page. I also re-sized the title to be larger than the city name.

8. Wider cuts - There are a few places where I “cut” through the illustration to connect the parts of the maze. I slightly more than doubled these for easier solving.

And so here is the “After”. Which maze do you prefer ? Did this improve the maze ?

This maze has it’s own page where you can download it. Happy mazing !!

Coming next week:

A monument in India

Maze #29 features the Thread City Crossing in Willimantic, Connecticut. While some bridges can be boring, and most are, but this particular bridge connecting highways 32 and 66 features 4 bronze statues of frogs sitting on spools of thread. And you are probably thinking, huh ? Why on earth is there a frog on a spool of thread? Well it has to do with The Great Bullfrog Battle and a local cotton mill. Read the story on this atlas obscura page.

And if you want to go long form just on the frog battle, this Wikipedia entry works.

Who wants to watch some drone footage of the bridge ?

Let’s start with a photo of one of the bridge statues: