Murder in the Maze Part I: The Maze

The next few posts  are going to require a little more explanation than normal.  The artwork itself isn't much different from the regular stuff, but the cause for it is.

In 1998-2002 my group of friends threw a series of Halloween parties that were HUGE.  They started out small with just our regular group of friends involved, but by 2001 they had exploded into an uncontrolled tornado of people.  The parties continued well beyond 2002, but that was the end of my involvement with them.

For each party we built a black plastic maze in my friends backyard.  We used black gardening plastic, PVC piping, staples, string, duct tape, nails, 4x4 posts, and anything else we use to keep the construction together.  The Maze was entirely enclosed so that once you stepped inside it was utterly completely dark.  You literally could not see your hand in front of your face once night fell.  You had to move slowly through it lest you slam into anyone else inside or some of the post supports.  It made us all feel like we were young again, playing hide-and-seek in the dark.

The amusing part was that the reason for all this darkness and construction was so that we could play a party game: Murder in the Dark.  We changed the name to Murder in the Maze, because that is where we played it.  It was like Hide and seek and Freeze tag all rolled into one.  We had a great time running around in the darkness.  I'll go into the mechanics of Murder in the Maze in my next post.

These two pieces of art were going to be part of a deck of cards I was creating for Murder in the Maze.  These were two of the victim cards.  My plan was to do a portrait of each of our friends as the murdered victims in the game.  These two are of myself and my friend Don.  My goal was to take flip the images and combine them in Photoshop to create something similar to the face cards of a regular deck of cards.  This deck never happened, but I got several good drawings out of the effort.

{Graphite on paper - scanned and manipulated in Photoshop}

More Maze History and Art:

Changing Course

When I originally started this blog, it was simply to display my general artwork.  At that particular point in my life, things were fairly dark and bleak, so that was the theme that I chose.  Things have changed somewhat.  

Zombiebites will still be the home of my shadowy works, but I will no longer be posting anything other than my darker pieces here.  This will now become the home for my horror works, my works involving fear and darker emotions, for all my Dark Arts.  I'm going to leave the older pieces that are not of the horror genre intact to avoid any kind of confusion or complicated relinking.  From this point forward though, Trail of Bread Crumbs will host all my work that has a spiritual and philosophical bent and EXP3 will host all of work focused specifically on graphic design.

I will have to consider if this blog is going to receive an adult rating though.  If I am truly going to explore my shadows in this space, I may need to apply that filter as in the shadowy realms things can get a bit...unpleasant.  We'll see what time brings.

{Created in Adobe Photoshop}