Always Plotting Something…

Nov 6, 2025

  • Drawing of a sphere covered in a square grid maze drawn in blue ink, with a path solving it drawn in red.
  • Drawing of a square maze drawn in blue ink, with some white areas not covered, and a path solving it in red.
  • Another maze-covered sphere, this one less dense and with some areas left blank.
  • A third sphere with larger areas missing at the top left and bottom right.
  • The four previous drawings are arranged on a cream-coloured background.

Amazing mazes I

Black/blue and red ink, fountain pen, on white card, 75x75 mm.

Most importantly, fixing the drawing order by exploring the maze and always drawing the wall to the left so these small examples take maybe 5 minutes to draw in a single continuous line, rather than thousands of pen lifts if I leave vpype to optimise the path and remove duplicates.

The maze itself is generated using Wilson's algorithm (random spanning tree) so all cells in the grid are reachable, and the solution can be found using depth-first search. The outline is then drawn by walking the entire graph always tracing along the left wall until we are back at the start. In some of these I've removed some cells to form unreachable islands. I'm also experimenting with applying some distortion to the path coordinates afterwards to make the whole thing less square.

#maze #algorithm #penplotter #penplotterart

21 minutes ago