About puzzles. Decent (and not so..) 18+

We decided to revive the trend of collecting puzzles. We started with a dragon, and ended up…in general, from there, 18+ in places 🙂

I found an old 1,500-piece puzzle that was missing one of its sides. Of course, we didn’t put it together, but why not buy new ones? We bought a dragon riding Notre Dame, and we’ll start our story with it today.

Dragon’s Fury (Anne Stokes)

Our first puzzle was Dragon’s Fury by English illustrator Anne Stokes. The puzzle is dated 2011 and priced at a modest 5$ for 1000 pieces. It came in a nice metal box.

A distinctive feature of this puzzle was the material of manufacture – as indicated on the box, the base was not the usual cardboard, but thin plywood. This made it possible to obtain rigidity in the assembled puzzle, thanks to which it can be easily moved somewhere without resorting to additional tools.

The puzzle was assembled in about two evenings, I did not see any special problems in assembling, especially since I assembled this puzzle mostly myself. Due to the packaging, it will be a great find as a gift for a child aged 10 and over. Due to the many clear lines in the drawing, it is relatively easy to assemble, and the drawing itself in the finished version looks very bright and impressive. Such a dragon will be a wonderful decoration, again, for a children’s room.

The quality of the puzzle pieces themselves is quite average. There were almost no puzzles installed incorrectly, but is it worth expecting anything for this price? I think not, so I can only recommend buying it!

Sadness (Luis Royo)

The dragon was assembled and I wanted something new. At first I came across a drawing by a girl-artist who works under the pseudonym Misstigri, but there will be a separate post about her works (and about puzzles), and in the meantime let’s focus on another, no less interesting puzzle. There is such a publishing house Heye. It released a puzzle for the painting Sadness by the Spanish artist Luis Royo, which belongs to the Dead Moon series. Interestingly, this work can be found on the Internet in a censored version and a regular one. Naturally, the puzzle was made based on the regular version in all its glory.

The puzzle came in a classic cardboard box. From the unpleasant – a lot of garbage poured out (the feeling that either the puzzle began to crumble from long-term storage, or simply poor manufacturing quality). At a cost of 12$ (in fact it was in Czech crowns and excluding delivery) it was disappointing, remembering the cost and packaging of the previous puzzle, but there was one small big “but” – the puzzle was released back in 2010 (“so what?” – You ask), and…if you search for it on eBay, then sellers from America, the Netherlands, Italy want for this, as stated, rare puzzle (and so, apparently, it is, I could not find it myself) a pitiful 80 dollars (the price of 6.5 puzzles that came to me, including delivery, and that is lower). That is, in my possession is a kind of collector’s puzzle, and that is cool in itself.

It’s hard to say if it’s a manufacturing or shelf life problem, but the picture is a bit “walking”, some puzzles just fell out of place (almost perfectly), some were partially unglued. It was frustrating, but I liked the end result, and our beautiful sad maiden is waiting for the moment when she will be glued together and hung solemnly in a frame on the wall.

Despite my “phew, 1000 pieces! Two days and it’s done!” – it took five days. More precisely, five exhausting days during the work of two people. The problem was not to collect the white background, the problem was to collect the shades of gray (yes, 50 shades of gray is about this work) and…hair. Moreover, the hair, like hair, was collected quickly, but there was a clear problem with their quantity, and with the monotony of the picture, absolutely not. As a result, the picture, which was perceived as “let’s start with it”, knocked out the desire to touch the puzzles at all for several days. However, I was satisfied with the result. I don’t know about you, but I really like this beauty:

I’ll digress. You might ask, “Why exactly are these puzzles? Why is it vulgar?!” The answer is simple. We wanted something unconventional. By a joint (family?) decision, we came to the conclusion that they would look great on the walls. The perception of such creativity by other people is of little interest to us, since the puzzles are important in our home, so what is in it concerns us exclusively, and the acceptability or unacceptability of such creativity is the problem of other people. This does not mean that if, for example, our nephews come to visit, the puzzles will not be removed or “censored” beforehand, but in all other cases we would like to see the house the way we see it. Otherwise, it is not our home, but a “shelter for guests.”

We are currently assembling one more puzzle and are planning to assemble two more. I decided to split the article, since the remaining three puzzles are by the same artist, so the article will be about her work in particular and puzzles in general. See you soon! 🙂

Author: Sa Crea

Hellmin