Finally finished!
I’ve been in Dortmund since Thursday and finally managed to complete this one.
I’m not a great art historian, but here are some details of featured works:
The Pig in Art, 2018-12-04
Ancient Egypt, the Fakes, Vol 2
Some more not completely genuine Egyptian artwork.
I think this is a picture of a painting done on papyrus that is sold to tourists in Egypt. It’s definitely not ancient, the style is off, and nothing comes through that many centuries this intact 🙂 I actually have one of those tourist papyruses on my wall:
I had quite a bit of trouble with the red part, even though it’s not a large area. Pieces would fit where they don’t belong, and soon nothing would fit anywhere. This was the last Jumbo puzzle I ever bought, and I’m not planning on getting more. Almost all pieces had the same basic shape. Stunning image though, and some glittering golden parts.
I had another puzzle from the same series, with a picture of Tutankhamon, also with glittering gold. According to my records, I completed it in November 2008, but I can’t find a photo of it.
UPDATE: I managed to find a photo after all:
Ancient Egypt, the Fakes, Vol 1
I like Ancient Egypt-themed puzzles. Some of them are pictures of actual Egyptian artwork, but most are of more recent production and only use ancient material as inspiration. Here are some of those.
Nefertari was the wife of Ramesses the Great. She is here surrounded by various gods of Ancient Egypt, right in front of her mouth is Osiris, and above Osiris is Isis, I think. Oh dear, I used to recognize all of these gods…
This is very similar to the first one, with the same images around the central picture. Different brand though.
This was great fun, and I still have the puzzle. The manufacturer, Lo Scarabeo, apparently make tarot (and other types of) cards, but I’ve not run into any other puzzles by them. I managed to spill a drink on this, but I dried it out as best I could and intend to do it again one day.
Mashup
I found two puzzles with the same cut! They are Tactic 500-piece puzzles, Waterhouse and Palm Beach. Makes sense that smaller manufacturers would use the same dies for all puzzles with the same piece count, whereas large manufacturers have different dies and even the same images can be differently cut. As I suspected, the mashup results were hardly spectacular, but I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for possible combinations.
That was fun! Hope to find some more striking combinations next time.
New Heye Puzzles
I went to my local puzzle shop in Helsinki and was amazed to see some of the new Heye puzzles already on the shelves. They are not yet available in the German online stores where I buy most of my puzzles! No Opus 2 yet, though.
Gradient was the puzzle that I actually went in to get, but I picked up a few others as well…
The Zozoville puzzle is my first in this series.
Romantic town (by Ryba) is a new series where several puzzles form a larger image (like the Zoo-series by Marino Degano). I got one of the two puzzles now available in the series.
Inner Mystic is not the kind of puzzle I usually get, but it’s just so beautiful. Going to be difficult, though. I sort of thought I had gotten over buying puzzles that seem difficult even though the image is beautiful, but apparently not 🙂
Logos, 2018-11-28
Encouraged by my flea market purchases I got a couple of new Tactic puzzles. Unfortunately, the quality is not the same in the newer puzzles. The pieces are much thinner, although not so thin that it’s a problem. It reminds me of Castorland. More annoying was that pieces don’t align exactly:
This was, of course, a really easy puzzle, so I don’t know how this would work out in a more challenging puzzle. It seems that the quality has gone from excellent to passable 😦 Some of the edge pieces weren’t properly separated, but I pulled them apart.
Kaj Stenvall Collection: Waterhouse, 2018-11-26
What a relief to work on a good quality puzzle!
This went really fast, only at the end with all the black pieces left did I slow down a bit. Since it’s a painting the texture of the canvas and brushstrokes helped with the lighter sections. Anyway, really good quality took me about two hours to complete.
The painting is by Finnish artist Kaj Stenvall, but if it looks familiar, it may be because of Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott:
In 1989 Stenvall published his first paintings with familiar-looking ducks in surprising situations. He’s still painting new duck paintings. Some, but not all, are versions of famous paintings.
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Stenvall’s version.
Whistler’s Mother and Sky Channel by Stenvall.
The paintings are really popular, and many are available as posters. Tactic also released some of them as puzzles. The puzzle series has been discontinued, but it is not rare to find them at flea markets in Finland.
If you’re interested, you can find more of Stenvall’s work here. It’s not all ducks, in fact, the recent ones are mostly Trump and Putin 🙂
And if you should happen to come across a Tactic puzzle, the quality is great! (UPDATE: The new Tactic puzzles are not as good and have much thinner pieces.)
Heye’s 2019 Catalog
Heye’s catalogue for 2019 is available here! There’s some great stuff, but the best news is that Historia Comica Opus 2 will be re-released. I missed it the first time around and have been so cross with myself.
Historia Comica Opus 1 is the history of the world from the start of the current era in cartoon form:
Opus 2 goes backwards in time from there:
Drawn, of course, by my favourite Heye artist, Marino Degano.
Opus 1 was originally released as an 8000-piece version in the late 90s with the title “2000 Years”. I have it, and I’ve completed it, but no picture, so you’ll have to take my word for it 🙂 It came in two 4000-piece bags, but I was too lazy to put it back like that -next time it really is one 8000-piece puzzle.
I have the 4000 piece version (Historia Comica Opus 1), but I’ve not completed it yet. So happy that I’m going to get my hands on Opus 2!
After Opus 2, my favourite new puzzle is the new entry in the Zoo series (Australian Habitat, also by Degano). Prades’ History River, Berman’s Patisserie and Adolfsson’s Regatta will also be joining me at some point…
17th and 18th Century World Maps
Maps, especially old maps, used to be one of my favourite puzzle themes, but eventually, I got a little tired of them. The same thing happened before with Alpine landscapes, but I would be happy to do either of those again.
World maps from the 17th and 18th Century usually show the two hemispheres as circles, and around everything, there are various illustrations, sometimes of ancient gods and myths, sometimes of scientists or scenes from world history. The world looks pretty much as it does on modern maps, except that Australia is usually missing, or at least severely disfigured. The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was by a Dutch ship in 1606, and even before that there were theories that there is an undiscovered southern continent (often present on maps as Terra Australis, Southern Country). Information about the landing was probably not immediately available to the map makers at the time, and even if it were, it wasn’t nearly enough to produce realistic maps. Also, India often looks way too small, and the far east is somewhat disfigured. But all in all, you know it’s our earth, not, say, Middle Earth of Tolkien. Which can not be said for some of the really old (mediaeval) maps…
Here are some old map puzzles:
Tanlay Castle, 2018-11-25
I managed to finish the Play Time puzzle.
After the sky, the puzzle was pretty easy. The reflection is blurry enough that it was easy to tell what belonged to the real thing and what to the reflection (not always the case).
Even in the easy parts it sometimes happened that pieces turned out to be placed wrong. If you place a piece in a “corner” formed by two other pieces, you shouldn’t have to worry that the piece is wrong so that you can’t find the next piece – or the piece after that. Even in good quality puzzles, it happens that the piece is wrong, but usually, the wrongly placed piece has exactly the same shape as the right piece. This is not a problem, because you can still finish the puzzle without problems. It’s happened to me several times that I finish a puzzle, and then I can see that two pieces (usually in the sky) need to be switched.
The pieces themselves were sturdy, which helps a bit. Knowing whether or not a piece is correctly placed is even harder if the pieces are very thin.
I might do another Play Time puzzle, but it would have to be a great image, and definitely a lot less sky!
Puzzler1909 