That’s a wrap on “MacArthur Bridge Mural,” our first completed puzzle from the new So Puzzled Puzzle Company series!
Obviously we’re particularly excited when we get to assemble puzzles that we created. We love getting to share stuff we’ve worked so hard on with the rest of the world and this one is no different.
I suggested in the Next Up post that the sky might be a problem but it was actually pretty easy. The sky isn’t a solid blue, so that helped.
One thing that surprised us with the sky was how much the visibility of the brickwork made a difference. This is a photo of a mural painted on brick so even sections of solid blue have that brick texture behind them and we could use that to differentiate pieces from each other.
We actually started with the railing for the bridge, then I moved on to the sky while Jenny worked on the water and the underside of the arches (especially the purple parts, since that’s her favorite color). The river water was a little bit of trouble but once we realized that the arches were lower on the design than we felt like they should be, everything started coming together quickly.
There’s always this added stress when we’re doing one of our own puzzle designs because we feel like we have to get it done as soon as humanly possible so that we can speak to it if people ask what it’s like to put together. So, to me at least, it felt like we were moving really slowly. Especially since it’s a 500-piece puzzle and we usually do 1000-piece puzzles. But it probably took three or four total hours over a few days, with some of that being solo work by me.
One of the things that made it more difficult is the style of the art. I’ve mentioned this with regards to other puzzles, where the art isn’t as “clean” and a streak of orange might really be smaller streaks of red and yellow. I’m not an art student, I don’t know how to describe that well. It means that sometimes you pick up a piece and see red and yellow but look at the poster and see orange and it makes pattern-matching difficult. That’s not a bad thing by any means, every puzzle is a challenge in its own way and that’s part of the challenge of this one.
Something else we noticed is that, because we designed this to be the same completed dimensions as our 1000-piece rectangular puzzles, the pieces felt huge.
Probably my favorite frivolous thing about this design – and this series as a whole – is the insert poster.
The poster design was something we kind of overlooked in our first series of puzzles but we made an effort in this series to put something a little more useful together and I love how it turned out.
Our soundtrack for this one was all over the place. We started with our classic rock mix that we usually use but my solo session had some Queens of the Stone Age and then we wrapped it up with no music, instead watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.
Jenny will have the Next Up post for our next one soon and keep an eye out for a National Puzzle Day announcement very shortly!