The Where's Waldo Legacy

there's few characters in fiction that everybody seems to know about especially those that are as simple in one note as Waldo from where's Waldo or where's Wally as it was originally named in the UK put on some nerdy glasses and a red and white striped cap and or shirt and everybody knows who you're trying to be as of 2007 the books have sold a total of 73 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 26 languages while has had two animated television shows about him he appears in a single frame in the movie Apocalypto people

have attempted to set the world record for most people dressed up as Waldo multiple times people have even gone so far as to develop efficient methods of finding him in the dizzying crowd scenes of every primary book when someone at slate developed a method which found that Waldo could be found more than half the time in two narrow bands someone else developed an even more detailed system using a genetic algorithm Randy Olsen created an optimal search path that should work for nearly every where's Waldo illustration but although finding Waldo is considered the main attraction and

goal of every War's Waldo book he was always considered to be an afterthought at least according to the artist who made him Martin Hanford Martin Hanford has specialized in drawing enormous crowd scenes apparently ever since he was a boy when he was inspired by battle scenes like those in the illustrated book The Golden history of the world or movies like The Alamo he would spend hours arranging regiments of toy soldiers and drawing pictures full of stick figures after graduating from UCA he became a freelance illustrator drawing his signature crowd scenes for magazines newspapers and advertising

agencies in 1981 Hanford was asked to design a cover for the band The Vapor's next album magnets drawing from the theme of the title song The assassinations of Robert and John F Kennedy Hanford produced this incredibly detailed drawing of an assassination scene forming the shape of an eye with the pupil made up of Secret Service the whites made up of ambulances and the rest made out of hundreds of minuscule figures rushing to the scene if you poured over this cover like one would do with any where's Waldo book you may be rewarded with the tiny

figure of the assassin on a rooftop packing up his rifle it wasn't until 198 6 that David Bennett of Walker books who is looking for a picture book similar to the work of a Litt known illustrator's busy places series recalled seeing crowd drawings from Hanford and asked him to develop these illustrations into a book someone at Walker books suggested Hanford create a character with distinctive features that would give people something to look for and as a result people would spend more time exploring the illustrations this is when Hanford created Wall-E however he goes by different

names in different countries such as Waldo in the US Walter in Germany Ubaldo in Italy Charlie in France and Govert in the Netherlands the success and popularity of these books was instantaneous and resulted in the publishing of seven primary books each book contained about a dozen scenes with Waldo and eventually other characters and items to find but Waldo never starts the painting he is always placed after the painting is mostly done the real meat of these books is the intricate crowd scenes Martin Hanford sometimes spent up to two months on a spread being drawn at

the same scale as the books the crowds in each double spread of where's Waldo the Wonder book number as many as 3,000 to 4,000 figures throughout your search you are treated to spreads full of visual gags deceiving red and white stripes and hyperd detailed worlds it's truly incredible how much visual noise Hanford manages to squeeze into every R drawing there is rarely a square inch of negative space to rest your eyes on even between the hundreds and thousands of figures there are minute details that fill up the white space in the later books finding Waldo

became increasingly difficult in fact Waldo has gotten smaller and smaller 80% smaller to be exact where's Waldo is where crowd illustrations are taken to their extreme Hanford is not the only artist to use crowds scenes in a similar ilar manner Dutch cartoonist Yan V van hin is also well known for his puzzles which feature these often chaotic and humorous scenes of crowds of people bustling about in different environments hin was previously a cartoonist who created stories for Comic magazines it wasn't until the 80s that he really started to make large comic pictures for puzzles each

illustration takes weeks first starting with an A3 paper with prospective lines and the main joke character then the rest is filled in completely with ink once that's done the sketch is blown up to the size of the puzzle and then neatly developed this image takes about 2 months to finish and he completes three puzzles a year these illustrations are considerably easier to read but still very busy their visual gags references and absurd detail are the primary focus but even he has hidden a signature shark fin in every puzzle that fans can search for works from

people like Hanford and Hoster May at first seem like anomalies but I can confidently say they are not there is even a word for this type of imagery viml Builder which comes from the word viml builder in German it literally means teeming picture book and is used to describe hyper detailed children's illustrations you can find in large wordless picture books these kinds of books have also been produced by other artists such as Richard scary and Ali Mito who is considered the father of the genre and of of course there is a subreddit for it which

contains some truly incredible posts Shar people's own insanely detailed drawings and other works from this genre you know all this talk of drawing dense crowds and hidden details reminds me of a much older artist herous Bosch may not evoke the cheerful feelings of viml Builder but he nonetheless employs a similar strategy filling in his works with weird creatures crowds of fig innuendos symbolism and meaning that would have been understood by people of the late medieval period paintings like the gardan of Earthly Delights the last judgment the temptation of St Anthony are some of his most

famous and are absolutely packed with the detail very little is known about Bosch but much can be gained from his works his most well-known paintings are about Sin its origin the Indulgence of it and the consequences of it they are meant to be poured over over studied closely to gain insight into all the moral attitudes and religious concepts of the time his nightmarish depictions of Hell Feature Creatures and scenarios that seem to come from an utterly wild mind but these images were not unprecedented they have origins in the margins of medieval manuscripts which would sometimes

have absurd backward scenarios and strange cross breeds of animals people and other animals there was also a significant Motif BOS employed Boys in each panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights and in many of his other paintings there is an owl which is painted quite creepily to us owls May signify wisdom but to people in the 1500s they seem to signify Menace death and the Devil Himself as Satan deceives Humanity so the owl is said to trick other birds causing them to fall into the snares set by hunters Peter bral the elders works are even

more similar to Hanford and hin he was born just 10 or so years after the death of heronimus Bosch and was his best known follower one needs to only look at his work to recognize Bosch's influence but most are of a very different tone as Joseph Kerner writes bral brought the Diabolical visions of Bosch down to earth his Works focused on detailed busy scenes of 16th century Dutch peasants in netherlandish Proverbs he renders literal illustrations of Dutch Proverbs and idioms there are over a hundred crammed in this painting but some you may know are the

world is turned upside down to bang one's head against a brick wall and to be as gentle as a lamb others that are much more foreign are to put your armor on meaning to be angry to have the roof tiled with Tarts meaning to be very wealthy and to be a skimming Ladle meaning to be a parasite and there's ones that I think should really be brought back such as horse droppings are not figs meaning do not be fooled by appearances he who eats fire crap Sparks meaning do not be surprised by the outcome if

you attempt a dangerous Venture and to have the world spinning on one's thumb which is like a cooler version of to have the world in the palm of your hand in the painting the fight between Carnival and lent around 200 figures fill the scene each signifying their part in Lent or the carnival in the foreground a fat man representing the carnival and a gaunt woman representing lent jousted with a stick plated with fish and a skewer filled with meat there's all kinds of related silliness that surround these two in the painting children's games there are

over 200 children and over 80 different games that have been identified there is no real focal point games on the edge seem to be just as important as those in the center it's encyclopedic like netherlandish Proverbs and the fight between Carnival and lent but this one in particular seems almost like a very artfully composed list however there may be a deeper meaning one which suggests the importance of games in a child's development despite all these light-hearted Works boyal was capable of Darkness as well such as in the Triumph of death a painting of what can

only be described as the apocalypse skeleton hords surround living souls and funnel them into a Giant coffin one skeleton wears a human mask another slices someone's throat everyone must face their fate even a king is told his time is up as he Withers away in a considerably less busy painting Boyle flippantly hides the main subject in landscape with the fall of Icarus Icarus is reduced to a pair of legs falling into the sea in the corner of the painting as the peasant plows away unperturbed in the present there are all kinds of artists that engage

in a similar obsession with Hyper detailed art like Gus morice and his colorful overwhelming seek and find illustrations which bring the we's Waldo aesthetic into the digital age in stark contrast you have Ben Tolman whose black and white drawings contain a much more sobering take on Modern Life my favorite work of his has to be the 2015 piece Urban which contains a skyscraper with all its walls removed filled and surrounded by tiny nude people as if we were looking into some sort of human ant Farm or Swedish architect yakim doist and his black and white

cityscapes filled with other worldly structures or Russian artist Sergey tuenov whose miniature surreal architectural masterpieces include floating cities cities on the backs of animals and even homages to Bosch While most works of art may use detail to develop and Elevate the substance of a painting or drawing in these illustrations detail is substance artists I have shown will deliberately Bend perspective use aerial views or cram people together unnaturally just to add more details these aren't paintings about making something clear to read or finicking around with a subject until it is perfectly rendered they're about letting detail

go wild letting the artist drop in a figure or item wherever and whenever they feel like it like I shared in an older video when I experienced the crushing boredom of grade school I would immerse myself in miniature work worlds of my own and fill them with dozens of stick figures and Tiny scenarios for me it became a meditative process something that didn't require so much conscious effort but still allowed me to produce representational things it seems there's a kind of common desire throughout history of artists who love to focus into their own little worlds

and do nothing but draw and paint details for some these performances of intricacy have deeper meanings for others it's pure fun but all these works of art come from a place of passion these are the kinds of works that can be looked at for hours we're so used to giving a momentary glance and moving on to the next painting says Larry Silver Boyle's work Demands a very different kind of looking a study published in 2017 discovered that people spend an average of just a little over 27 seconds looking at a work of art in museums

there could be a variety of reasons for this the tumultuous pace of Modern Life people having difficulty concentrating the lack of comfortable seating the fact a large percentage of people spend time taking selfies with art nonetheless it's an enlightening fact original War's Waldo and Yan Von Hoster and spreads may not be entering Museum soon as Yan Von hustan once said my work is usually not appropriate for a museum but I don't mind I just love to make these illustrations but maybe there is something to be gleaned from art that is designed to make make you

stick around works that reward close looking not necessarily because you're searching for a deeper meaning but for something to make you smile or maybe you're just searching for that elusive strangely dressed man staring back at you [Music] he [Music]