Shoujo Puzzles?

I've always loved furoku: the little gifts which come with shoujo magazines, originally devised to 'encourage' girls to buy their own magazines and not only share one issue among a whole group of friends. Cute goods have long been a part of shoujo, and I also adore the extra gifts which come with otome games (at least the 'treasure box' editions). One thing I saw that caught my eye was a jigsaw puzzle, and it got me thinking: surely there are puzzles featuring shoujo art?

The answer is yes, but they tend not to be as readily available if you're shopping in English. After discussing this with my best friend, who loves doing puzzles, I looked around and was surprised to find that the print-on-demand company, Redbubble, now offers jigsaw puzzles. So I decided to give it a try and make my own shoujo puzzle!

I took this picture when I first received the puzzle in the post and started putting it together. Overall, I'm really happy with the results! There are a few little things that didn't quite work out, but that was my fault rather than that of the printing. Redbubble's product quality is very varied, probably the fault of them wanting to offer so much variety; some items are quite nice, while others are honestly...not. But the puzzles are really good!

They come in their own white tin with the art on the front, and the puzzle pieces are quite glossy- they look a lot like the finish on a poster print, which I personally really enjoy. The slight shine makes the artwork 'glow' a bit in a way that a matte printing doesn't. I scanned the image at 1200 dpi and found that the quality was quite good, though admittedly the puzzle I bought for myself is only a 110 piece puzzle, so not very large.

You can see the detail here much better. This is the same image which is on the front of my website and in my portfolio section, so you can also compare the puzzle printing to the original scan. As you can see, I struggled a bit with the bleed allowance; Redbubble has set it up so that a significant bit of the top and bottom will be cropped off. This is to accommodate shifting of the machine during the cutting process, but I've never seen quite such a large bleed allowance as theirs:

A very significant chunk of the top and bottom are included in the bleed allowance! Given that I tend to use the entirety of my paper, and never really have 'unimportant' sections of a painting, this meant that I was not at all prepared to create an artwork with such a large bleed allowance. In future, I'll have to keep that in mind if I start a painting specifically meant to be made into a jigsaw puzzle. I also did find that the soft blues were a bit too faded after the conversion to CMYK colour-space, but that is on me, again; I can always edit the image after conversion to enhance the blues a bit more.

The one critique I do have for these puzzles is that they don't have a unique cut. Essentially, this means that there are multiple pieces which are the exact same shape, and could be placed in the wrong spot as a result. This is very easy to account for, though, if you're an artist and planning on making a painting into a puzzle. You simply need to ensure that the image lacks any significant areas of the exact same colour; make sure there's plenty of gradient and variety, and enough going on in your picture that it can be reassembled with ease. I'm not very good at puzzles, and yet I have had very little trouble putting this one together; between all the watercolour gradients and lineart, it's very easy to recognise if I'm trying to put a piece in the wrong spot.

One thing I've read in reviews is that these puzzles cannot be glued; the material is just not water-resistant. Given that any artist on Redbubble is going to probably offer prints of their work, too, I wouldn't really see the point in glueing the puzzle, anyway; you're better off just putting it back in the tin so that it can be played with again in future!

Redbubble's jigsaw puzzles come in a variety of sizes, starting at 30 pieces and going up to 1000. The 30 piece and 110 piece puzzles are 25x20cm, and from there the size increases as the piece count does. I really appreciate that the smaller puzzles are actually quite small; they're similar in range to an A5 book, which means that if you don't have the patience for giant puzzles that take up your whole table for days, they're perfect for you! I was really impressed by the cute little tin they come in, and the glossy, art-poster style finish. The quality of Redbubble's products definitely varies, but their puzzles are definitely now on my 'will make' list!