"Bacintyme Boulevard," Train Art by Greg Garrett

"Bacintyme Boulevard," SunsOut, 1000 pieces, 16 x 34 inches

I find a lot of new jigsaw puzzles by going over to Amazon and doing a generic search for 1000-piece puzzles. I usually then quickly flip through the images, page-by-page, noting which ones might immediately catch my eye. When I've spotted five or six puzzles that way, I go back and take a closer look at them to see if one or two of them might be something I want to order. That's how I found "Bacintyme Boulevard." The puzzle looked so much like a photo of small-town America (it's actually a painting by railroad artist Greg Garrett) that it got a second-look from me...and a buy.

I figured that this one might turn out to be a little tough because it uses so few colors, none of them bright ones, and I was right. But despite the large sections of roadway and sky, this one was a whole lot of fun to watch come together in the end.

Of course, as shown above, I started with the biggest sections of "color" in the whole picture, the two trains and that wonderful display of typical American advertising. I love the fact that Garrett included WalMart and Subway in that sign grouping because what could be more typical of American retailing than those two? They seem to be everywhere now.

Then it was just a matter of starting to fill in around the two trains. Thankfully, the roadway included a nice yellow center-stripe and a white border marking, allowing me to begin the road surface about the same time.

When I started to concentrate on the two trucks, one in the foreground and one sitting between the two trains, the picture quickly started to take shape.

SunsOut puzzles almost always have enough puzzle-piece variety that even the larger sections of one color come together fairly easily, and this one is no exception. Although the pieces in this cut are not nearly as varied as some SunsOut puzzles, there is enough variation that concentrating on puzzle-piece shape works fairly well...and soon, the road was almost done.

And then there was nothing left but a big tree and approximately 150 pieces of gray sky...and the real work began.

But it started to happen, finally - even if it took me almost one-day's worth of puzzling to get it all done.