"Pet Day" Comes Together (The Art of Susan Brabeau)

Pet Day, SunsOut Puzzles, 1000 pieces, 27 x 35 inches, Artist: Susan Brabeau

Of all the puzzles I've worked in 2018, this may be my favorite of them all, and one of the main reasons for that is that I've really fallen in love with Susan Brabeau's art. Brabeau has a special talent for keeping her pictures "real." Her characters all look like real people, the kind you might run into on any given day while wandering around your hometown, rather than a bunch of posed models. This makes her work very distinctive, and I'm always on the lookout for puzzles featuring anything of hers.

Too, I've generally taken a liking to SunsOut puzzles because of the great images that company uses. Most puzzle companies are predictable. You know to expect collages or landscapes from certain companies, Disney stuff from others, etc., but with SunsOut you never know what you might find. And because of their distinctive square boxes, SunsOut is always easy to spot on the shelves, so I see a lot of them.

I hadn't realized just how big 27 x 35 inches was until I finished getting the border pieces all sorted.  This is the largest puzzle I've done this year, and it required just about all the available space on my puzzle board, which is 32 x 40 inches. That didn't leave a lot of room to sort different colors, and that slowed the whole process down a bit.

I finally decided to take what the puzzle was willing to give me, and if that meant putting sections together and linking them to the main puzzle later, that's what I did. But the characters started coming together fairly quickly, and I could see that, as usual, I was going to be saving a lot of dark pieces for the end. Surprisingly, the teacher's coat turned out to be one of the easier parts of the puzzle despite the pattern on the coat fabric. The classroom background and some of the animals would prove to be a good bit more difficult.

But even those sections started happening for me eventually.  As it turns out, the hardest part for me to complete was the big dog in the center of the picture because the dog's fur was sometimes hard to tell from the hair of the little ponytail-wearing girl up front.  Once I began working those two sections simultaneously, it got a lot easier to place those pieces.

And then, when I finally got this one down to the home stretch (after having it on the board for eleven days), pieces started flying into place.  The last 100 missing pieces, as shown here, went into place in just a matter of minutes until I finally reached the most satisfying part of the process - clicking that last piece into place.

I really hated to tear this one down and re-box it, but it's just too large to frame and place on one of the walls of my study. But I have a stack of puzzles that I can see myself working again sometime, and this one is most definitely going into that stack.

(I will be doing an overall rating of the SunsOut Puzzle Company soon.)