Christmasis around the corner and people are doing some seriously crazy things. When itcomes to annual Christmas traditions, it's not just about playing secret Santaand making gingerbread, people are coming up with a lot of other - very creative ways - to spread the cheer.
Twitter?
In fact, some of them have taken to drawing festive portraits ontheir street maps! Now that's a tradition we could get behind.
Meet Anthony Hotye, man who is creating some interesting 'artwork' on the streets, or rather, maps! According to an Evening Standard report,?AnthonyHoyte, from Cheltenham, creates art by planning intricate routes that formimages on the Starva -?a widely popular GPS among cyclists.?
Hoyte, who works as a heritage consultant, now tagshis part-time profession as Starva Artist. Using his road bike as a paintbrush, he follows a mapped-out route of roads and trails.?
Drawing portraits like this is far from simple - there aremultiple roadblocks that come your way, quite literally. By that we mean, the mapre-routing or the GPS signal getting lost in some spots.?
Speaking to Standard, Hotye says, ¡°There¡¯s a littleglitch in there near Shepherd¡¯s Bush where I obviously lost the GPS signal andit creates a straight line that cuts through a couple of street blocks, butthat¡¯s minor,¡± he noted. ¡°I made a couple of mistakes but they¡¯re so small thatnobody¡¯s going to notice really,¡± Hoyte added. ¡°I¡¯m happy. It looks how Iwanted it to look.¡±
The report states that during his recent reindeer-shapedroute, which is also his third annual Christmas ride, he was meant to gothrough a park to form a point on an antler, but it was shut off due tosnow.?
¡°I just spend a lot of time looking at maps and it¡¯swaiting for things to jump out at you,¡± he explained. ¡°Normally I look at mapsuntil I see something ¨C- ¡®That looks a bit like a nose¡¯ ¨C- so I think ¡®Wherecan I find eyes near that?¡¯¡±
His longest ride till date was for the snowman, at justover 88 miles and 10 hours.??
¡°That¡¯s about my maximum distance ¨C I wouldn¡¯t wantto go too much above that. It¡¯s a long day in the saddle," he was quotedas saying.?
According to reports, Hotye draws inspiration forhis quirky Christmas tradition from Canadian cyclist, Stephen Lund, who gainedpopularity on the app in 2015 for drawings he called 'GPS doodles'.??
Reports state that the Canada native, Stephen, began thisunusual craft in 2015 to unwind and be creative. Since then, he has logged22,300 km, and his longest piece has been a 220-km mermaid.??
Twitter/Yasushi Takahashi?
FYI, the actual world's record for the largest GPS drawingbelongs to Yasushi Takahashi from Japan.? Takahashi pulled off this feat to propose to his girlfriend back in 2010..He made even larger piece in 2015 that was 105,734-km long.?