Jigsaw Puzzles
Something Missing
As a puzzle enthusiast, I have long been interested in making an art piece on a puzzle, but it took me quite a while to get around to it. I purchased a puzzle (1ooo pieces), put it together, and then painted it white, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it yet and to I just had the prepped puzzle on the back burner for about three years until I finally ended up using it for a project in one of my college art classes.
Even after painting over the puzzle, the preparation process was quite involved. To make sure the puzzle would be usable, I actually had to take each piece apart and put it back together to keep them from sticking. I labeled each piece with a number with the hopes that organization would make putting the blank white puzzle back together easier, but they proved rather unhelpful since there were no neat rows (and I managed to lose count several times). I ended up working in sections, detaching and reattaching pieces almost immediately.
The colored patches are done in pastel while the patterned pieces are simply Sharpie on the white background. The entire puzzle is sealed with spray fixative.
The overall pattern of the piece is of an unfolded paper crane, with the black and white areas representing the surfaces that would be seen when folded, whereas the colored sections would have been folded inside and obscured.
After I was finished, I took it apart and put it back together, which was more challenging than I had anticipated - especially for the people who tried to help me. I hope to make more art pieces on puzzles in the future - I actually have another puzzle set aside for that very purpose - and now I have more of an understanding of what would and would not be user-friendly, but we'll see what happens.
The title is mostly just a generic puzzle joke, but I did actually lose a puzzle piece somewhere in the process of prepping the surface and starting the drawing. My best excuse for that is the fact that I frequently carried this piece back-and-forth across campus from the art studio to my dorm room. I was ignoring the issue, hoping that I would be able to find the piece somewhere, when one of my amazing roommates suddenly decided to help - she grabbed an empty cardboard box from the recycling bin, folded it in half, and cut me out a new piece that fit remarkably well. You probably can't see it from these pictures, but I know it was one of the black and white edge pieces near one of the corners. That piece gives this project just a touch more character and the memory it represents holds a special place in my heart.
This entire project was fun not only in itself - but because it was one of the most interactive pieces I've ever done. While I never had the chance to make it truly interactive by placing it - unmade - in an art show for all attendees to contribute to, working on it in class and the living room of my apartment spurred the excitement and engagement of all those around me. (2019)
Skele-Puzzle
Once again, it took me a LONG time to get around to making another jigsaw puzzle. After graduating, I have a lot more time on my hands and have spent some of it getting back into making art and a LOT of time getting back into jigsaw puzzles. One of the local libraries has a puzzle lending shelf that I have made use of, and have been doing my part to give back to the system by making new puzzle pieces whenever I come across one that's missing. This process has varying success rates, but served me well in this piece.
I turned my attention to this project because a family friend gave me some puzzles she found at a thrift shop, and I resolved that once I found one with the right qualities, I would paint over it. I have realized that I dislike puzzles with pieces that lack variation in shape, as often pieces seem to fit where they don't - and from Something Missing I realized that having pieces whose edges line up is a really helpful quality with designs like mine. Once I found the right puzzle - a nice but run-of-the-mill landscape with mountains and wildflowers - I spray painted it black (which worked so much better than the acrylic paint and roller I had used before), and as I was staring at the black surface wondering what to do, I came up with the idea of just drawing skeletons. They started out as chimera skeletons, but after being continually stumped by analogous bone structures, I slipped in a couple single animals - and tons of fish to fill weird spaces; at the very end, I even ad libbed some to finish it off. Some of the space filled in naturally, almost like it does when I draw my patterns, and some of it is awkward empty spaces and there are a couple half-finished skeletons.
I think this idea appealed to me as appropriate for the surface - after all, fossils are a bit like jigsaw puzzles when we dig them up, and that's the general vibe I'm going for with this piece. I know some people would think of this as creepy, but one of my favorite teachers in high school had a classroom covered in skeletons, which he admired as the architecture of the body, and that experience, along with my passion for biology (which prompted my X-Luminate capstone series), has made me think of skeletons as cool and natural, not creepy at all.
I went back and forth over whether to fill the skeletons in. When I started, I intended to, and even filled in the first thing I drew (the top of the crocodile head) before deciding to do that step later. Some time later, I realized that I could fill the skeletons in with my patterns. However, as the negative space began to fill up and the bones got denser and denser, some curled in on themselves, some overlapping, I began to worry that filling in the bones might overwhelm the piece. I finally decided to go through with filling some of the skeletons in partly because my cats knocked the puzzle over and I had to assemble two thirds of it, and that helped me to realize that it was difficult to discern what was bone and what was negative space in some cases. I think the white balance worked out pretty well with the three different fillings of bones (solid, patterned, and hollow).
I was a bit worried because I just free-handed everything and I'm so attached to the ability to have a preliminary sketch, or at least the ability to erase and re-work, so I figured it could end up looking terrible - but I am happy with how it turned out, and I also enjoyed the process immensely.
