I loved this artwork & grabbed his “StandOut Puzzles” (their website is down but their instagram is live) 750-piece puzzle, “I Moose Be Dreaming“, with art by Erin Brekke Conn …. and man it was hard. The entire painting is pointillism!
With that difficulty, the seven extra pieces that they threw in — that appear to be from the same puzzle, but from a different cut — don’t even add much challenge, although I appreciate the idea. I set this puzzle up a few nights ago and did a little bit at a time over several days.
I started with the sky — appreciating the gradient aspects — although it wasn’t a perfect gradient, so even that wasn’t easy! The colorful flowers at the bottom left and right were next. One helpful aspect of the image: the flowers on the left were blue/purple and yellow/white, and on the right, orange/red. The various parts of the antlers came next — the far edges were more white/light blue, and the central parts had more colors. Then I was able to fill in the trees. As with the flowers, there were color differences from left to right — much more subtle and smaller and fewer, but the little flecks of color for stems and random pointillist dots on both sides, did offer some hints: yellow stems on the right, reddish stems on the left, for example.
I was reduced to shape-sorting relatively early, although the pieces had many unusual cuts, so the standard shape-sorting sorts only covered half the pieces. Even at the end, with probably 50 or so pieces, it was soooo hard! That was the moose’s face and body …. which were shades of purple and blue dots.
The artist, Erin Brekke Conn, is Alberta-based, and the whole puzzle line is Canadian art.
