Custom Puzzle Craft - Puzzle 19

This is the third in a series of three photographic prints I purchased from internationally recognized photographer, Michael Seewald

Michael writes: "The Three Graces - China '87: Within the last hour, I had been threatened with arrest for photographing larger-than-life statues being unearthed outside of Xian and eaten an almost inedible lunch. To soothe my nerves and digestion, I wandered into a park where I found these three slumbering ladies. I hurriedly set up and made the shot. In my haste I had not noticed that I had not changed back to color after my last black and white shot. Just as I started to make the change, my body shielding my work, a young man walked by with a ghetto-blaster sure to wake my ladies. My luck held, however. When I was ready they were fast asleep again."

For Michael Seewald prints available as puzzles see: Michael Seewald - Prints

Significant milestones

First experimental puzzle exploring mixture of intense line cutting with a standard cut. All three figures are completely line cut (exterior and interior lines) along with most of the stone blocks and bench (read text below the picture). The puzzle is quite a challenge!

Problems

No technical problems!
I'd change some of the cutting style between the legs towards the bottom, and in the upper left.

Specs

Size: 13 11/16" wide by 10 3/8" high
Cutting Style - Push Fit and Strip Cut
Number of pieces: 213
Line cutting: Extensive
Figurals: one (a trowel to help assemble the linecut stone blocks in the wall)
Signed and dated Signature Piece

Prints of "The Three Graces" may be purchased at http://www.seewald.com/

As it happened (from my Journal archives)

April 8, 2000

Evening - I cut Puzzle #19 today - the third of three Michael Seewald photographic prints I recently purchased

I employed the most extensive line cutting so far. The puzzle image shows three women sitting asleep on a bench. I cut out all three figures and did complete line cutting of all elements of their portraits (hands, shoes, socks, purses, head, other clothing elements). Behind them was a stone block wall and I cut the wall into mostly individual stones, or a few times, pairs of stones. To aid the puzzle assembler in dealing with the tough task of putting the wall together, I added a mason's trowel figural within the wall. Above the wall was an extensive area of foliage. I decided to "playfully" use a very simple cutting style here and used the traditional "strip cut" style. As this was the first time I ever tried the strip cut style, the results were below my standards for how a puzzle should look, but I still feel it has a great effect. I also used the "bulb" interlock for the legs of the women as these line cut sections resulted in very large pieces that needed to be subdivided. As the rest of the figures were line cut, these "bulb" cuts in the legs stand out compared to the nearly invisible line cuts elsewhere. On the ground at the bottom of the puzzle I could have used perspective line cuts or some other non-intrusive cutting style, instead I used more of the "bulb" cut, which, in my opinion unnecessarily competes with the pattern within the legs. Some pieces are larger than in my other recent puzzles, this was on purpose to keep the puzzle from being excessively difficult. However, this puzzle does contain some rather small pieces too - for example, the portion of the socks visible below the shoe straps belonging to the woman at the left, are separate pieces.

So overall, puzzle #19 was a good exercise in practicing line cutting and offers the interesting contrast of line cutting with traditional strip cutting. Intensely line cut puzzles are "push fit" puzzles, that is they don't interlock and may be easily upset if bumped, and this puzzle is like that. I felt the solution I came up with in #17 was good - line cutting in the interior, surrounded by outer pieces which interlock near the edges (but not necessarily at the edges)

Putting the puzzle together is interesting. All of the interlocking sections go together very rapidly leaving the assembler with a lot of islands of color, without a clue how they interrelate. Working from the ground up, one can place the feet, and parts of the bench. Working downward from the heads is more difficult as the components of the arms, torsos and hands reveal their secrets slowly. The wall goes together last, of course, and it is only the fact that there are not a lot of stone blocks that the puzzle is fairly readily solvable.