finished piece

So. That's that then.

It's been a couple of weeks now since I completed the jigsaw – the digital version that is –  and I've delayed posting the finished piece until now because I wanted to distance myself from the image and try to be objective about it. On completion of any piece of work, my I'm naturally inclined to HATE the results and it's only after a few days that I can look at something with fresh eyes and see both the good and the bad.

So, what do I think? Well, intellectually, it was a satisfying if hugely frustrating project to work on and to see the the final piece assembled feels like something of an achievement. Aesthetically, however, it's a little problematic. It's quite a muddy image – there's a lot of black inky scribble in there as you might expect, but the colours have lost a lot of their vibrancy in translation from page to screen. There's always a huge amount of compromise involved when you digitise an image (even more so, if and when you print) and in an ideal world, it might have been better to collage the original drawings and photograph the results but I'm far too precious with my sketchbooks to go cutting them up and my photography skills are minimal to say the least.

I love the irregularity of it all – the inconsistencies of size, shape and colour, particularly the latter. It's funny how your interpretation of a single colour changes so much over a period of days. In the original photograph, the roof tiles are a fairly consistent terracotta colour; here there's a happy confusion of reds, oranges, purples and browns.

Speaking of the original photograph, here's a scan of the box lid:

You can see how wildly divergent my colours are from the original. And for completion's sake, here's a photo of the finished puzzle, which I had to put together in order to work out how all my drawn pieces would fit together:

Back to the charity shop for a 1000 piece puzzle now? Hmm...