For my Strava elephant, I managed to incorporate a feature of the landscape (Swan Lake) as part of the picture.
The big giraffe I Strava-doodled last weekend has created quite a stir. After I posted it on Reddit, my blog views jumped from 59 on Tuesday to nearly 12,000 on Wednesday. Today it showed up on Peleton Magazine’s Facebook page and, a few hours later, Strava plugged it in a Tweet and on their Facebook page as “one of the most creative pieces of Strava art we’ve seen…”
I’m hoping my follow-up Strava art effort isn’t too anticlimactic!
For today’s elephant sketch, I tried a new technique – namely, incorporating a feature of the landscape as an integral part of the picture (i.e., Swan Lake as the elephant’s eye).
Don’t be chicken. Hopping over the farmyard fence and exploring new terrain is a great way to take your Strava art to new heights!
Strava art from January 22, 2015
Compared to my handful of previous Strava art efforts, “Chicken” was rather liberating, as it was the first time I really broke free from Victoria’s pockets of grid-pattern streets and framed a picture in long, sweeping pedal strokes.
It was, in other words, the first time I really spread my wings and almost flew.
Making “Chicken” was fun and comparatively fast, and it exposed me to some roads and routes in a part of the city I was previously unfamiliar with.
Why spend $5.99 on a Hallmark card when you can wow your Valentine with a city-sized expression of love?
It was Valentine’s Day 10 days ago.
Retailers love Valentine’s Day – Hallmark stores, flower shops and jewellery stores especially – because it wrings, on average, $134* out of the pockets of everyone who gets guilted into thinking “the bigger the gift, the bigger the expression of true and heartfelt love.”
Humbug.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for true and heartfelt love. I just don’t want to have to prove it with my Mastercard lest I get banished to the doghouse for several days after the 14th of February.
Okay – so let’s say I’m gonna take my chances and try to dodge the doghouse by sending a big card that oozes with sentimental gooeyness. At Hallmark.com, the biggest Valentine’s Day card they’ve got – a scant 5 x 7 inches – will set me back $5.99. Plus $1.99 for shipping. Plus tax!
Outrageous.
Thank goodness for my Garmin, my bicycle and Strava.com (whose tagline, coincidentally, is “Prove it”). Early in the morning on February 14, I snuck out and sketched this massive Valentine’s Day message for the love of my life.
Sure, it took several hours of planning and a couple hours of pedalling around Victoria in the dark and the drizzle. But I saved nearly 10 bucks, wowed my wife AND made every other husband in my cycling club look like a lazy, inconsiderate oaf.
Interactive Strava art by Stephen Lund • There’s just one way through the maze to Victoria’s Craigdarroch Castle
A work of Strava art from January 26, 2015
There’s just one route through this giant maze, which begins at Royal Jubilee Hospital (top right) and ends at Craigdarroch Castle, covering five of Victoria’s central neighbourhoods* along the way.
Sketching this work of Strava art was decidedly nerve-racking, as I knew a half-block deviation in the wrong direction could botch the whole thing.
It was also decidedly slow-going, as the whole thing is laden with 90º corners, short lines and tight turnarounds.
A few things went wrong in the lower left corner – I missed a zig and a zag, and a GPS glitch created some funky loop and whorls – but happily, these didn’t mess up the path through the maze.
Potential Strava art pictures “pop” from the map when you highlight main thoroughfares and long connecting streets. In images 2 and 3, the general shape for Stephen Lund’s Strava giraffe clearly emerge.
One fella said, “What – you just decided you wanted to draw a giraffe and then you sat down with a map and figured out the route?”
In some cases, that’s my approach: conceive the idea and then manufacture the route. But in the giraffe’s case, it was a matter more of discovery than creation.
In an earlier post about my Strava art process, I showed you the Photoshop map I use to plan my pictures (1). A few weeks ago I created a new layer with all of the city’s main roads highlighted (2)…and potential pictures started popping off the page!
The sequence of images here shows the giraffe’s emergence. Once I’d highlighted Victoria’s main thoroughfares, the general shape of the giraffe (3) was easy to see. From there, it was just a matter of fleshing out the details (4).
I didn’t really create her. She was there all along.
“Ahh,” said another of my fellow cyclists, “you’re just like Michelangelo. The map is your block of marble, and you just see what it wants to be.”
Um, yeah – exactly like Michelangelo.
Following is the anecdote he was alluding to.
The only legitimate comparison to Michelangelo, I think, is that many people have been accusing me of being ‘touched in the head’ as well…
For many months, Michelangelo would arrive at his studio, stare all day at an 18-foot block of marble, and then go home for his supper. Thinking him mad, those who knew him asked, “What are you doing?” To which the Master would reply, “Sto lavorando” – I’m working. Three years later, that block of marble was the Statue of David.
Well, that’s what it’s like on the streets of Victoria, BC today, as I spent my morning surprising the city with about 100 kilometres worth of Strava giraffe.
In a straight line from head to front hoof, she measures about 11 kilometres.
I had to use the “Strava OFF/Strava ON” trick for a few sections of the legs as the inventory of roads (especially straight ones) is rather meagre in that area. With the extra dashing about between OFF and ON points, this work of Strava art called for around 115 km of cycling.
As for the question on my Strava profile post – “What do giraffes have that no other animal has?”
A Piper PA-34 draws a flower 10,290 feet above Palo Alto and San Jose, CA, on February 19, 2015
So this is happening right now (1:30 PST on February 19) in the skies above Palo Alto and San Jose, CA. A small aircraft (Piper PA-34 #N1411X) is “drawing” a flower in the sky. How cool is that?
(The correct answer: almost as cool as drawing selfies and sexy women on the streets of Victoria, BC!)
Kudos to the airborne artist!
Here’s a short video clip of the real-time radar tracking on flightradar24.com:
Stephen Lund’s first Strava picture on the streets of Victoria, BC, came with many hard lessons. Like “If you goof up along the way, you’ll need to start from scratch!”
As my first Strava picture and only my second attempt at using Strava for artistry rather than training (the first being my New Year’s wishes), this January 5 effort was laden with tough lessons.
To the aspiring Strava artist, I offer these words of caution:
Draw carefully: your Garmin doesn’t come with an eraser. I was nearly half done my Strava selfie when I botched an eye and made a series of wrong turns along the nose (below). After 30+ kilometres of drawing, I had to abort the mission and start from scratch.
Explore unfamiliar areas in advance. My trouble with the nose arose because I didn’t know the area, the streets and the shortcuts I’d incorporated into my route.
Prepare for a long outing. As this was my first major Strava art project, I had no idea it would require 3 ¼ hours on the bike. By the time I got to the hair, rush hour was in full swing and dark was falling. I had no lights, and in my panic to finish I missed a few patches of hair. (Some have noted, unkindly, that this adds to the picture’s realism.)
Brace yourself for imperfection. When I finally got home and uploaded the ride, I discovered I’d made a wrong turn on the right side of the mouth. After much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, I just called it “Picasso-esque” and moved on.
To plan your Strava picture or message, all you need is a street map, a pencil and a splash of imagination.
Since I launched into my Strava art obsession on January 1, the question people most often ask me (apart from “Are you insane?”) is some variation of “How do you do it?”
Do you create a route at strava.com and follow it on your Garmin? Do you have an app that maps out messages and pictures? Do you ride these routes “freehand”?
Though I’d love to say it’s the latter, it’s actually none of the above.
At its essence, my approach is decidedly old-school: grab a map and a pencil and start planning.
Because the route-sketching process involves a lot of trial and error (“How would it look if I took the path through the park instead of the main road?”), I prefer to work with digital paper and pencil. Erasing and retracing is far easier, and the end result is a PDF that I send to my iPhone and use as a map when riding the route.
Strava art planning, step by step
Far and away, the most important tool is a detailed street map. In Photoshop, I pieced together oodles of Google Maps screen captures, sufficiently zoomed in to show most of the street names. The resulting city map is my base layer.
For each new message or picture, I create a new layer and plan the route using Photoshop’s paintbrush. Where street connections aren’t clear or when going off-road would benefit the artwork, I zero right in with Google’s Earth view and street view to explore the possibilities…or I hop on my bike and do some reconnaissance.
As the image or message emerges, there’s lots of zooming in and out to test the effects of small changes to the route.
Once I’m happy with the result, I make the route layer semitransparent (so I can read the street names) and save it as a PDF – a map to follow en route.
As I find it easiest, during the actual ride, to follow written directions, I type out turn-by-turn directions from the starting point to the end. I keep a hardcopy tucked in the front of my jersey for reference as I ride (a couple hardcopies if it’s raining, as they get soggy and fall apart after a while).
