Another image by one of my favourite artists for puzzles, Kandinsky. Obviously, I did the smaller images first, and things slowed down considerably when I got to the black part in the middle. In the end, I had about 120 pieces that were all black. I had a problem with a false fit, but managed to sort it out. D-Toys is not, unfortunately, all that good quality, but they have some nice images.
I got my act together and finished it! The image is a scene from Greek mythology. Ulysses (now usually known as Odysseus) is going to pass a place where Sirens (birds with the head of a woman) lure ships onto the rocks. They do this by singing, and their song is irresistible to men. Odysseus wanted to hear the song and survive, so he sealed the ears of his men with wax and had himself tied to the mast (instructing the men they should under no circumstances free him until they were clear of the Sirens), and so Odysseus became the only man to hear the Siren song and live.
While I really like the image, and especially the colours, much of the puzzle wasn’t all that pleasant, and it was mostly to do with the quality. I had quite a few false fits, and overall the fit wasn’t great. I was often unsure whether a piece really belonged where I’d placed it. I’ve done a few 1000-piece D-Toys puzzles, and those were definitely better. I probably won’t be doing any more 2K D-Toys puzzles.
I’ve been working on this 2000-piece puzzle for almost two weeks, and it’s not going that well. In fact, I almost certainly won’t be able to finish before I leave for Helsinki in a week, so it will probably have to wait until July. (One reason that it’s taking so long is that I’ve been playing a lot of computer games lately.) The image is a scene from Greek mythology by John William Waterhouse, and the pieces that are left are mostly shades of grey and brown. This is my first 2000-piece D-Toys puzzle, and it’s likely to be my last. I already knew that the fit can be ambiguous, but I think this is worse than the 1000-piece puzzles I’ve done before.
This painting by Danish artist Carl Bloch from 1866 was rather entertaining as a puzzle. The characters are looking at someone, and the man looks suspicious. The women look interested, but like they’re trying not to let it show. My first thought was that this is the kind of looks you would get if you start taking photos of strangers 🙂 The artist has also painted himself into the picture, he is sitting with his back turned at the smaller table in the background, and one of the other men is his friend who commissioned this painting.
The title given on the box (Ancient Egypt) isn’t much help, but on the puzzle (right bottom corner) it says “Nebamun hunting in the marshes (around 1350 BC) – Thebes, Egypt”, which is much more informative. Nebamun was a middle-ranking official scribe and grain counter at the temple complex in Thebes, and he is known because of the stunning paintings found in his grave (they are now in the British Museum). More on Wikipedia, and for some reason German Wikipedia has even more photos.
Some Egyptian art looks a bit formulaic, but this is anything but. Especially the birds, and the fish under the boat are stunning. Nebamun is standing in the boat, and between his legs there’s a child. He’s holding a bird with one hand, and seems to have a snake in the other. Maybe it’s just a strangely shaped arrow, because his wife looks to be holding a quiver. I can’t see a bow, though.
D-Toys is a Romanian brand, and as I have found before, the pieces are sturdy, there is a very good mix of piece shapes, and the pieces fit together well. Unfortunately, it’s fairly easy to place pieces wrong if they are all of the same colour. At the end, I had about 150 black pieces (in addition to the black edge pieces), and I had several cases where I had to pull apart a section that I had already finished, because a false fit somewhere blocked progress. Very annoying, but the actual image was a joy to do, only the black “border” was troublesome.
Great puzzle in the D-Toy Vintage Posters-series. The vehicle pictured is actually a tricycle, of course. Not sure if “Glascow” is misspelled, or if this was correct in French in the 19th Century. It could even refer to some other place, not Glasgow, as I’m assuming.
I started from the bottom and worked upwards. The cut is great, I especially like having the two-tabs-opposite type pieces being a minority. It’s also good in the sense that it’s precise, although where the image is no help you do need two points of contact.
Nice little puzzle with a funny cut. Loved the image by Toulouse-Lautrec. Even the dark parts had some variations in shade, which helped.
I think I was almost a third in when it struck me that all the pieces have the same basic shape. Usually I find this annoying, and I would probably get tired of this, too, in the end, but I found it a lot better than having only the usual two-tabs-oppsite pieces. The cut was advertised as difficult on the box, but it didn’t seem like that to me. If anything, it was easier than doing a puzzle with exclusively two-tabs-opposite pieces, because there was always just one way the pieces could fit together.
Another unnamed puzzle (sigh). The puzzle itself was great fun, and of good quality.
A beautiful painting by John William Waterhouse, painted in 1908. I was expecting the puzzle to be quite difficult, but it wasn’t that bad, really. I did the hair and skin first, and the darkest areas last.
This is a poster from a 1935 Marlene Dietrich movie called The Devil is a Woman. I actually have the DVD and watched it while working on the puzzle. I didn’t like the movie the first time around, and it was no better now. I found the story misogynistic in the extreme, not because Dietrich played an unscrupulous woman who charmed men to get money out of them, but because it was portrayed as perfectly natural that an infatuated man would try to use his money to control her, and then beat her when it failed. I mean, that poor man, what else could he do? Bleh.
Anyway, the puzzle was nice, although the fan-thing (the movie was set in Spain) behind her head was pretty hard. I’m glad it wasn’t any bigger 🙂 And yes, Marlene Dietrich was supposed to be Spanish.
Puzzler1909 