Breaking The World Record For The World's Largest Hand Drawn Maze
Although doodle requests are closed, you can still help support this cause by donating to Living Arts Detroit HERE.
Breaking the Record
In 2020, during the Covid lockdown, many of our local art programs became underfunded. at the time, I ran a small traveling art studio called On The Gogh Studio, which provided art classes to schools, community centers and senior living facilities. Because schools and senior centers were the first to shut down, I found myself out of work and with a whole lot of students without a creative outlet. The maze began as a way to raise money to help and it as I drew it, it became more of a community engagement. And as people got involved, the maze evolved into something much bigger than the roll of paper it was drawn on.
In total, the maze contains over 300 doodles and names. When someone made a donation, they could request a doodle inside the maze path. This obviously made the maze creation process much, much longer, but I believe this is what made it worth it. If you were to unroll the maze, you'd find happy birthday's, portraits, memorials, anniversary's, pets and phrases special to those who requested them.
The biggest challenge was keeping up with all of the Guinness guidelines. This proved more difficult than drawing the maze itself. Below are the list of rules that needed to be followed, along with a few videos of the measuring process, a full time lapse and the official Guinness video.
• Maze path can not exceed more than 1cm
• Two independent witnesses must watch the entire process
• Entire creation process must be video tapped.
• Maze must be drawn in a public place where people can observe
• Maze must be proven solvable and show the solvable path
• Maze must be measured (I used a local land surveyor)
• Maze measurements consist of the maze Itself and not the paper it's drawn on
• Image of entire maze in one single photograph, unrolled (shown above).
All Videos
All Videos
Largest Hand-Drawn Maze - Guinness World Records
Guinness World Record! Full Time lapse-Breaking the Record for the World's Largest Hand-Drawn Maze
Current Guinness World Record! Official Measurements: The World's Largest Hand-Drawn Maze
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Below are the details that I documented along the way as the maze was being drawn. This wasn't a necessary part of the guidelines, but it helped update those who were following along at the time during the record attempt.