After Matthew Haussler pulled the cover from what could be the world's longest hand-drawn picture maze, he said he needed a minute.
Before Sunday afternoon's reveal in a corner of the Block Thirty Seven mall in the Loop, the artist had only seen the depiction of Chicago's lakefront — 731/2 feet long by 3 feet tall — in 19-foot sections on a table in his Pilsen apartment.
"It's a good feeling, but it's a lot to take in," said Haussler, 30.
Starting with a view looking northwest from the Shedd Aquarium, the black-and-white maze moves clockwise on the lakefront path past the Adler Planetarium and the Field Museum, past depictions of picnickers, marathoners and one man helping another fix his bike, before ending with a couple frolicking at the "Finish" in Grant Park.
It took Haussler eight months to draw the maze, which is larger than a maze that unofficially has been reported as the previous record-holder: a 4-foot-by-34-foot hand-drawn work by Pittsburgh-based cartoonist Joe Wos.
Haussler said he would submit his maze to Guinness World Records once it is solved.
"I had long hair, and I looked really crazy after drawing it," Haussler joked to the roughly 40 people who shot video, took photos and moved their fingers along the 3-foot-wide printer paper that hung for three hours Sunday afternoon.
Haussler is part of a group of four or five artists who have found a way to make a living creating maze art, he said, a path that began for him a few years ago while he was working at a bank in Portland, Ore. Pulling from a high school art education, the Cincinnati-native doodled mazes while on breaks.
He soon incorporated pictures into the mazes, moved to Chicago, and in the last couple of years has been able to make art his full-time work.
"I took a leap of faith and went into the art side," Haussler said.
At Sunday's exhibit, Hailey and Penny Badtke, ages 7 and 5, worked with their mom to solve a sea-horse maze sitting on a table on 11-inch-by-17-inch paper, the size, along with 81/2-by-11, Haussler normally draws and integrates into books he sells.
But when asked if they tried to work out Chicago's lakefront maze, the girls breathed deeply, widened their eyes and shook their heads.
Shannon Wurthman, 29, shared their sense of awe.
"It's very strange to me that this came out of somebody's brain," Wurthman said. "Not only that somebody can draw this but the fact that it's a solvable thing, it's overwhelming."
Aside from being solvable, the work is meant to display people doing selfless acts for each other, engaging in a form of non-monetary giving, Haussler said.
He will eventually put out a 156-step hint list, he said, but will first upload the work onto the Internet and allow aficionados to try to solve it on their own.
"There are some people who are excited to figure it out," Haussler said.