A shark was suggested next, so naturally I looked to beaches for a location. The feature selection process made me look for a toothy mouth, a dorsal fin and a curved tail fin (scientifically, a caudal fin).
Balmoral Beach has always been one of my favourite beaches and the shape of the beach is curved nicely for a caudal fin. A sharp intersection of streets further west also would work well for the dorsal fin. The issue was the mouth and for a shark, teeth were necessary. Where would I find an area with jagged streets? Fortunately, the area around Cremorne has lots of tiny, square blocks which, whilst not sharp as such, would work as small teeth.
This time instead of profile-view like all my previous designs had been, I wanted this one to look like it was bursting out in three dimensions. Doing this certainly adds more complexity because it demands retracing your steps. In two dimensions, you can run/ride a simple continuous line and finish at your starting point with no issues. When you start adding more elements, patterns and detailed features, the only way to make it work is by going out-and-back, because the design always has to be a continuous line. GPS breadcrumbing works like that, and (to my knowledge) there is no way to have an 'island' of features that are disconnected to the rest in a single route.
The eye and gills are a perfect example of this, because, obviously, an eye is not connected to a jaw, and gills are not connected to an eye. Here's where accuracy can take a back seat for the sake of the overall design. You can see below what was required to add these details - I had to have a single line connecting everything, so I put them all in a row to make it work with the overall picture. Funnily enough it made the shark look angry, all the better! The route is mapped by the black line (the Google Maps 'Measure Distance' tool).
In short, regardless of the size and detail of the design, everything has to be one continuous line. It's fairly obvious but the more detail you add, the longer the run/ride will be, so make sure you take that into consideration with regards to your fitness level (or use it as the impetus to increase your endurance, like I did).
"Regardless of the size of the design, everything has to be one continuous line."
In the end the shark turned out pretty well considering it was my first attempt at three dimensions (except for the 'spike' poking out of the pectoral fin at the bottom, I look at that now and still don't like it - I hadn't realised join-the-dots was a thing yet). From there it got easier. Here's the finished product:
Comments