26. Bird puzzles with holes in them
Comparison and assembly of two shaped puzzles with dropouts; Songbirds and Lovebirds from Puzzle Lab; (about 4700 words; 60 images)
Introduction
This is my third posting of puzzles made by Puzzle Lab in this newsletter/blog. The first, that you can read here, was about their 357 piece Tiger Majesty. That one is a detailed review and also includes information about the company. The other was the one I posted three weeks ago which had comparatively brief retro-reviews of the four Puzzle Lab puzzles that I assembled before I began Bill’s Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles. Those puzzles are:
This posting is basically a comparison of two more Puzzle Lab puzzles. They issued Lovebirds last February. I assembled it at that time and have re-assembled it this year sparked by their release of the similarly themed and designed Songbirds. Today’s essay begins with a comparison of these puzzles, and continues with my reminiscence of Lovebirds from last year and then walk-throughs of my assembly of both puzzles this year.
Puzzle Lab makes premium-quality puzzles and these both fully lived up to the high standards that they set for themselves. Other than their distinctive artwork and unique cutting designs, which I will discuss in the comparison, all other aspects of their fabrication and presentation that I describe in my detailed review of Tiger Majesty also apply to these puzzles.
Data
Lovebirds made by Puzzle Lab (Canada) in Feb 2022 – limited edition; sold out
artist - “Yummeee” and Tinka Robev (Puzzle Lab CEO)
puzzle design by Andrew Azzopardi
laser-cut 6mm (1/4”) 5 ply birch
150 pieces about 10” x 10” (25 x 25 cm)
Songbirds made by Puzzle Lab in Feb 2023
artist - Sarah (Thiessen) Tonin puzzle design by Andrew Azzopardi
laser-cut 6mm (1/4”) 5 ply birch
285 pieces about 18” x 12” (45 x 30 cm)
Comparing the puzzles
Lovebirds was released in 2022 as a limited release Valentine’s Day puzzle; only 100 were made. It won the 2022 award for Favorite Shaped Puzzle of the Year in the Puzzle Pals Choice Awards, sponsored by Puzzle Hobby magazine.
Songbirds was released on Valentine’s Day in 2023 as a springtime-themed successor to the sold-out Lovebirds and is a worthy successor to its forerunner. It’s artwork was specially commissioned for this puzzle, and it is the first Puzzle Lab puzzle to include dropouts since that one. (Songbirds is not a limited edition puzzle.)
Hopefully there will be many more dropout puzzles coming from Puzzle Lab. I greatly enjoyed the challenge of assembling both of these puzzles. Because of its larger size Songbirds was the more challenging of the two, but on the other hand, Puzzle Lab’s co-founder and cutting designer Andrew Azzopardi included an especially devious cutting trick in Lovebirds (shown below after the Spoiler Alert) that really “fooled me good.”
Size and fabrication
The opening image at the top of this newsletter is actually two photos stitched together and it is misleading because the puzzles are not actually about the same size. Lovebirds is 150 pieces while Songbirds has nearly twice as many larger-size pieces. Because of the shaping and dropouts I cannot accurately measure their respective average piece sizes, but the pieces in Songbirds are clearly much larger.
Both puzzles are up to Puzzle Lab’s high standards, consistent with their price as premium-quality puzzles. Both have images that are UV printed onto paper that is affixed to 6 mm (¼”) thick 5 ply, but the image of Lovebirds is glossy while Songbirds has Puzzle Lab’s now-standard non-glare finish. The newer Songbirds has more vibrant colours but that is due to differences in their style of artwork. They both have Puzzle Lab’s characteristic black sealant on the back side and they are packaged in attractive black magnetic-closure boxes and muslin bags.
Cutting-design
Both puzzles are shaped and include many dropouts of various sizes. Dropouts are voids in the interior of the puzzle. I counted 29 of them in Lovebirds, and 28 in Songbirds. ropouts are voids within the puzzle. Last year when I picked up my Lovebirds Puzzle Lab’s co-founder Tinka Robev told me that removing them adds considerable time to the puzzle-making process, which is why companies charge more for puzzles with dropouts than for their other similarly-sized puzzles.
From an assembly perspective, dropouts are rather like missing pieces; they often create places where you expect to find a piece but never will. That makes assembly considerably more challenging, especially if the puzzle is being assembled without using a reference image to see where the dropouts are. Based on my reading many comments about shaped puzzles and dropouts online, both of these features are considered by most experienced wood puzzle assemblers to be very desirable attributes for a challenging puzzle.
Like many of Puzzle Lab’s cutting designs Lovebirds and Songbirds do not have whimsies. Instead, Andrew Azzopardi adds both interest and challenge by employing colour-line cutting in parts of them, making both puzzles partially push-fit. I say “partially” because both puzzles are generously endowed with connectors - mainly earlet-shaped ones for Lovebirds and rounded knobs for Songbirds. Aesthetically, I think that is a good choice. Colour-line cutting, combined with shaping and dropouts makes the cutting of these distinctive enough; adding figural pieces would seem to be excessive gimmickry.
As far as I know, Lovebirds was Andrew’s first hand-designed puzzle. His other early puzzles were all the products were based on a computer algorithm (explained here.) I enjoy the challenge of his parametric puzzles but I must admit that I perceive better karma in his hand designs. However that might really just be the curmudgeon in me coming out.
I appreciate and enjoy the human design ingenuity that is associated with the heritage of jigsaw puzzles. I accept the benefits of computer driven robotic cutting, but computerized cutting-design seems a step too far on the road towards also using images designed by artificial intelligence software. I suppose that computer-made images will come someday soon to the world of jigsaw puzzles, and perhaps artificial intelligence technology will be developed that interacts the image-design with cutting-design it will probably even produce great puzzles. But as a traditionalist I am not keen on that aspect of the future.
Since designing Lovebirds last year Andrew has had more experience with hand designing, including Papercut Partridge and about half of Tiger Majesty. He already showed a real knack for it in Lovebirds, but his skills are improving further as shown by the elegant cutting on the wings in the above photo. Also, in Songbirds he uses knob-style connectors that are about the size and shape of the lilac petals, making assembly of that part of the image particularly challenging.
Image - lovebirds
When I first picked up the puzzle, Tinka told me that the image of Lovebirds was licensed from an unidentified artist. At first glance it looks like a Victorian era painting but on close examination it doesn’t appear to have been painted. (Zoom in on the above photo to see what I mean.)
I think I found the online source using a reverse image Zoom search, but it is in a seamless tiling composition. I also found other images made by the same hand of the flowers without the birds, but nowhere could I find the identity of the artist. They were uploaded to various licensable stock image suppliers by illustrator and vector artist “Yumeee”. (“Vector” is a type of digital scalable image.)
The artwork I found online looks like it could be either a photograph of actual high-quality Victorian wallpaper or newly-developed digital illustrations intended for use as on-screen wallpaper that emulates the Victorian look. Notice that it is not in the wreath-like composition of the puzzle so I presume that Andrew or Tinka reorganized elements from stock image to create their Lovebirds picture. (Note that there are only three birds in the source image; one of the birds in the puzzle is a mirror image of one of them.) [Update: Tinka Robev has confirmed that she was the one who created this composition from Yumeee’s vector image, which they licensed from Adobe Stock.]
I tried to identify the species of birds shown in this artwork but I wasn’t successful. I researched from my own bird identification field guide books and online sources, and asked my friend Aziza Cooper who is a very dedicated and experienced birder if she could recognize them. She thought that they looked sufficiently life-like that they could be based on real birds, but they did not look like any species with which she was familiar.
I tried doing Google reverse image searches from the artwork. That did bring up photos of kingfishers, but the resemblance is obviously only based on their colouration. The beaks and tails of kingfishers are nothing like the birds in the Lovebirds artwork. So these puzzle birds remain a puzzle.
[Digression: The idea of identifying birds using a reverse-image search from rather simplified artwork is not as strange as it sounds. A few weeks ago I wanted to see if I could identify who made one of my folk art carvings. A reverse image search did not come up with other similar carvings but it did match it with photos of Atlantic puffins, and that species is a better match than with their west-coast cousins the tufted puffin. I also discovered that puffin decoys are used in conservation efforts to try to get them to relocate their colonies to safer locations.
End of digression]
Image – songbirds
The image for Songbirds was made by Sarah (Thiessen) Tonin, a self-taught artist and community arts educator from Winnipeg who currently lives in Victoria (where both Puzzle Lab and I are also located.) The above photo of Sarah was taken by her sister Julia when they went to the Puzzle Lab store shortly after the puzzle’s release. Sarah posted it on Instagram with the following message:
Got to see the puzzle I designed IRL for the first time today at @the.puzzlelab and wow it was significantly bigger and more glorious than I was expecting! (I even witnessed a complete stranger buying one!! I think I was much more excited to see him than he was to see me but that’s ok haha.) Can't wait to try it out for myself soon!
On the Puzzle Lab website this puzzle is described as “a true collaboration between the artist and puzzle-maker.” Since Tinka and Andrew are on vacation and I didn’t want to disturb them I sent Sarah an e-mail asking her about the development of this image for the puzzle. That began an exchange of correspondence. The initial commission from Puzzle Lab gave her a lot of room for creativity. Her main direction was that it was to be a follow-up puzzle, with a similar theme to Lovebirds and with an image that would be suitable to be a shaped puzzle with dropouts.
Sarah began with rough sketches on paper to explore potential images:
While drawing these I tried to wrap my head around the idea of creating a puzzle with negative space (no background) that had strong enough connection points. … When tasked with a love-themed puzzle to be released on Valentine’s Day I automatically thought the image would have 2 birds, representing a romantic couple.
This drawing process helped me realize that the 2-bird design felt inauthentic and did not reflect my current understanding of what love is, and what healthy relationships (romantic or platonic) and communities look like.
… I used some photos of birds off the internet as references for my drawings but I don't recall their species name, I simply selected the images based on the shape and positioning of their bodies … [and arranged them] in a way that felt balanced and dynamic. The iPad is a relatively new tool for me and I am not great with technology so often find it frustrating, but for this kind of step it is unbelievably helpful and saves so much time.
[This is a] rough trace of the birds and general placement of flowers, which I sent to Tinka and Andrew for approval. I also sent a cleaned up version of the peacock drawing, but we agreed that the Songbirds one was better.
Upon receiving approval, I went ahead and re-drew the birds on my tablet, adding more fun details and patterns and of course also adding all the lilac flowers … which I did select very much on purpose, as to me they are the quintessential spring flower and hold a lot of nostalgic scent memories.
Remember, Sarah grew up in Winnipeg where the lilacs of late April are among the earliest Spring flowers. I grew up in Minnesota (which I often say gets used Winnipeg weather) and I still share Sarah’s association of their beautiful sight and scent as being as evocative as the re-appearance of robins as reassurance that Winter is indeed over.
Other important changes as the image evolved were the addition of the birds-nest and removal of lilac clusters from the centre of the image.
I wanted to highlight the interaction between those two middle birds and not have busy flowers in the way / distracting from that connection.
After some further tweaking (e.g., adding leaves to strengthen the fragile twig and legs of the birds in the upper-left and lower-right) and “playing around” with various colour palettes Sarah finally settled on the following version and sent it to Andrew who Sarah says “added a paper texture” and “designed the cut lines and puzzle-ified it using their fancy machines!”
This digitally-designed image for Songbirds uses black outlines and colour-fill, which has limited options for creating the effect of shading. I am not sure why but that style of artwork is very commonly used for shaped puzzles: Here, here and here are my reviews of other shaped puzzles that have similar colour-filled black outlining. The effect is attractive although it does make the image appear somewhat more simplistic and cartoon-like than if it were an actual oil or acrylic painting.
I presume that what Sarah calls “paper texture” is an effect that Andrew digitally added to give more life to the image. He also widened some of the black outlining. Here is a close-up that shows how the final puzzle image is darker and has more complexity than the above one:
The plumage of Sarah’s birds is somewhat fanciful – as she says, she played around with the colours – but she may have been influenced by Western Tanagers. As you can see below, they are quite colourful and would make quite an impact when seen in their natural forest habitat. They migrate north to Western Canada, both to Winnipeg and near Victoria, where Sarah may have seen them in the wild and probably would have remembered them fondly. In fact, they annually arrive here just about when the lilacs are in bloom, so she may even have seen them in a context similar to her artwork.
The shapes of the birds, which is more fundamental to their identity than their colouration, came from those online photos. Aziza was able to recognize four of them as being Virden, a common desert species in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. The greenish-yellow one was trickier to identify. She recognized it as a warbler but didn’t know which kind. She posted the pic to an international Facebook bird identification group and someone ID’d it as being a very rare natural hybrid called a Brewster’s Warbler.
[Update and a short digression: Speaking of names, Puzzle Lab refers to this artist as Sarah (Thiessen) Tonin, on her website she is Sarah Tonin, and her e-mail identifies her as Sarah Thiessen. I thought it must be a marriage thing and belatedly sent her an e-mail message asking for her preferred form. After publication I received this reply”
Hey Bill! Just realized that I never hit send on my response to this email. ... My real name is Sarah Thiessen and my art name is Sarah Tonin, but I'm happy to be called either. I generally prefer Sarah Tonin for art stuff because it's fun and memorable but my regular last name is just fine too.
All along I had been mispronouncing Tonin (with a “short ‘o’”) so I hadn’t appreciated the quirkiness and humour of her “art name.” Writers have pen names, and actors have stage names, but there is apparently no comparable term for an artist’s professional alias. Here is an interesting article written for artists about the issue related to using a pseudonym.]
Assembly experiences
Lovebirds – last year
This is an excuse for me to take a trip down memory lane to my first month of assembling wood puzzles. Lovebirds was only the fifth wooden puzzle that I assembled after I instantly got hooked on them while assembling my first one, Unidragon’s 215 piece version of Serious Panda in early January of 2022. That was about two years into pandemic-related isolation and I was in need of non-screen recreation. Even while still assembling it I began doing online research to find out about other sources of wood puzzles.
I was amazed at the number of wood puzzle companies I found by googling “wood jigsaw puzzle.” Since I had not been spending money on restaurants, movies or other outings I had money available for recreational pursuits that I could do while maintaining what we used to call “social distancing.” My spending spree began!
My first order was for three Wentworth puzzles, but they took a while to get here from Great Britain. Further googling revealed that there are Canadian puzzle-makers, including Puzzle Lab which is right here in Victoria where I live! By early February when I assembled Lovebirds I had done two other puzzles from Puzzle Lab (both about 300 pieces), one from StumpCraft (400 piece), one from Wentworth (250), and a 1000 piece cardboard puzzle from Cobble Hill Puzzles (another locally-based company, although not manufactured here.)
My early intention had been to alternate wood ones with cardboard ones to save on the cost of my extravagant new hobby. That intention did not last long. The puzzle after this one was another 1000 piece cardboard one but it had an even more challenging image than Cobble Hill’s Butterfly Garden. I never even completed it.
You might have noticed in the above photos that all of these early puzzles were assembled directly on my table. I had not yet learned about turning wood puzzles over to see their cutting patterns, nor about the other advantages of using a cork bulletin board as an assembly surface. Also, these photos of the completed puzzles are the only ones I have of them. I had not yet discovered the online discussion group Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club, and never dreamed that I might someday want to share my puzzle memories with other people online. I just took photos of the finished puzzles to be souvenirs of the transitory assembly experience.
At the time, Puzzle Lab had only been in business for about one year. Lovebirds was posted on its website as a Valentine’s Day special limited-edition puzzle. Although it is only 150 pieces it was presented as being a challenging puzzle. Despite that warning about its difficulty I attempted to assemble it without peeking at the image on the box. I had begun trying to do puzzles that way with my fourth puzzle, the 400+ piece Soft Maple in Autumn, following a recommendation from Jasen Robillard’s FAQ.
Don’t use the reference image: your mileage may vary on this one but I generally don’t use an image when solving. I find the image gets in the way as you end up often searching the reference image for quite some time trying to find where the piece goes within the frame, rather than using techniques like block to find the pieces that go together. This is often the habit that is hardest to break.
I recognized myself in that expression “… often searching the reference image for quite some time trying to find where the piece goes.” I wasn’t able to realize fully my no-peek intention the first time I tried it, but the next time I felt great pride in successfully doing Wentworth’s 250 piece version of Monet’s Springtime that way. Lovebirds was my next puzzle after that one.
Even though Lovebirds is only 150 pieces, with its absence of a regular edge, dropouts and tricky cutting I expected that it would be quite a challenging puzzle, and it was. My log records that I needed four peeks at the image on the box to complete it.
Spoiler alert
Below here there are photos that include features in both puzzles that some people might prefer to discover for themselves. On the other hand, if your powers of forgetfulness are as good as mine the following content will likely do you no harm. But proceed at your own risk.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I mentioned that Andrew used an especially devious trick in Lovebirds that he didn’t use again in Songbirds. It was these two identical pieces.
When I noticed them about halfway through assembly last year I was sure that there must have been a mix-up at Puzzle Lab and I had a piece that should be in someone else’s puzzle. That seemed reasonable since I was also convinced that I must have missing pieces in my own puzzle. (Remember, this was only my sixth wood puzzle.)
Since I had picked up my puzzle from the workshop on the first day they were released I phoned Tinka to warn her about this. She thanked me and said that we could sort things out after I had completed the puzzle. I felt so embarrassed when I realized that I had fallen into a trap set for me, but also a bit pleased when I thought about the big laugh that that she and Andrew must have had when Tinka told him about my phone call.
Songbirds assembly
I knew that I wanted this puzzle as soon as I saw that Puzzle Lab was going to release a follow-up to Lovebirds that would also have colour-line cutting and dropouts, so I didn’t need to look at it carefully when I received an email saying that it was available for pre-order. When i picked it up a few weeks later I took my usual precautions not to see the image on the box cover. (It was only after the puzzle was assembled that I learned that wasn’t really necessary because the pictures on the covers of both Lovebirds and Songbirds boxes only show part of the puzzles.)
I did remember that the birds and flowers would be much more colourful than the Victorian artwork of Lovebirds, and that its composition also was rather circular with an extra-large void near the centre. Since I remembered that Tinka had told me that removing the dropouts made puzzle-making much more difficult I expected that there would only be about five or six of them this time and that they would all be large. That is all that I had noticed in my earlier glimpses at the image.
First, I flipped the pieces and spread them around without any attempt at sorting:
Then I sorted by colour, leaving some working space in the middle of the board. The second most common pieces were the green leaves, but Yikes there are sure a lot of lilac-coloured pieces!
I began assembly with the distinctive colours of birds, leaves and sticks.
Unexpectedly it was the sticks that gave me the first breakthrough in beginning to put some mini-clusters together to begin to give the puzzle some shape:
I continued mostly trying to place the pieces that were not the purple flowers. Knowing that this puzzle featured colour-line cutting I could already see that those flowers were going to be tough. I could also see that the connectors were all roundish knobs that were about the same size as the lilac petals.
As I completed the birds I began focusing more on the leaves and sticks. In my assembly workspace I put the flying bird at the top both because that is what made sense from having watched birds land on my bird feeder and it looked right from an image composition perspective":
Things were proceeding slowly but smoothly, but I had a constant reminder in front of me that the hardest parts were yet to come:
The loose pieces that included leaves and sticks were beginning to dwindle away and progress was slowing down . . .
. . . and slowing down . . .
. . . and slowing down. Getting the composition into a loop felt like I a landmark achievement, the way that finishing the outside edge feels, so I took a photo:
As expected, the lilacs were indeed the most challenging part of the puzzle but Andrew had not done as much colour-line cutting with them as I had expected. This image could have been a much more difficult puzzle if he had decided to challenge us by locating the round-knob connectors around individual petals. Even so, the lilac part of the puzzle was very challenging.
I focused first on completing the inside of the “wreath”:
Unlike some puzzles where assembly can get really fast as there are fewer and fewer pieces left, this one stayed challenging right to the very end.
The last few piece was not at the top edge but went into a hiding place in the large internal dropout. What a fun puzzle!
Lovebirds assembly redux
Although I had done this puzzle a year ago, and it was still in my memory as having been one of my favourite puzzles, I began its assembly with only rather hazy memories of its image and cutting pattern. I remembered the cutting pattern as including colour-line cutting and other tricks, and that it had been quite challenging. I also recalled it as being a Victorian-looking painting of foliage and small birds of a species that I did not recognize, and incorrectly remembered it as being a wreath-like circular composition with a large void in the centre.
Since this puzzle is only 150 pieces, and they are relatively small ones, I knew it would easily fit on my puzzle board. First, I flipped and spread them out without sorting:
Then I sorted, mainly by colour:
I decided to try to begin with the birds. They and a red flower cluster came together rather easily.
The puzzles Andrew designs with a parametric computer algorithm have tendril-like connectors. For this hand-designed one he primarily used classic knobs and earlets as the connectors, and was kind enough to include some clues by having some connectors go past his color-line cuts. I continued to build mostly two- or three-piece islands.
I was able to consolidate a few larger islands and make some more mini-clusters. But I still wasn’t able to connect them enough to feel like the puzzle was taking shape.
Then I had a brief growth spurt before slowing down again. If I remember correctly, my assembly last year was fairly similar to this with several sub-assemblies but not knowing how they fit together. Last year it was at at about this stage where I began to peek at the image to get of sense of where the birds and flowers were placed in relation to each other. This year the thought of peeking crossed my mind but was easy to ignore. I knew I could do this with a little patience.
Then, after some slow slogging the next growth spurt began with an ahh-haa moment. I mean that literally. I actually said “Ahh-haa!” out loud when I saw how the two largest assemblies could be connected. And that led to being able to incorporate all of the other the mini-clusters fairly quickly. I have never made so much progress so quickly before. But I’ve also never had to wait this long before the image began to develop into a cohesive whole.
The twin pieces that had befuddled me the first time around were no problem this time. In fact, because they were such a memorable feature of that first assembly they actually helped me to orient the large white peony flowers in the image.
There were still 20 pieces to put in place. In thinking that the composition of this image had a large drop-out in the middle I had misremembered, however even now I think of its roundish composition as being wreath-like. Also, the drop-outs are smaller and more numerous than I had remembered.
This last stage went quite quickly. The hardest part was finding the connectors on the assembly amid all the distractions. Several of the pieces went into places that I thought that Andrew had left void as drop-outs.
Re-assembling this puzzle was a bit of a test for me. Part of my willingness to buy these rather expensive playthings has been based on my expectation that I would enjoy assembling them again and again. Many people only enjoy doing puzzles once, and they lose their appeal after their challenge has been met and conquered. Would I prove to be one of those people? No! I think that I got just as much satisfaction from this tricky toy this time as I did a year ago, and I am already looking forward to doing it again someday.
Billy, I still haven’t jumped down the rabbit hole of puzzles. And I haven’t contacted Paul about borrowing one of yours. I do enjoy reading your posts and feel myself, maybe, giving in. Stitching is still my cup of tea.
This is a subsequent addition to the comment I just posted, Bill. That one escaped from me before I thought I'd hit "Post." In any case, the extra bit I wanted to report was that I'd gotten a chuckle out of your feeling that you had fallen for a "trick" when you noticed two puzzle pieces were identical.
I am still not inclined to assemble puzzles "blind" to the provided pictures. That plan of action doesn't attract me, though I freely admit that you seem to notice all sorts of details because you often do that.
Cheers!