The Complete Guide to Aimee Stewart Puzzles

Most people buy a jigsaw puzzle by looking at the picture. A smaller and more interesting group buys by artist, and once they do, they stop browsing. Aimee Stewart is one of the names that converts Australian puzzlers into that second group, and the reason is not really the pictures. It is that she designs for the act of building.

Who she is, and how she got here

Aimee Stewart was born in 1971 and lives in the Washington State town she grew up in. She is self-taught. Her own biography describes the ambition as "erasing the lines between 'digital' art and 'traditional' art, until only the inspired creation remains", and lists Alphonse Mucha, John William Waterhouse, Michael Parkes and Nick Bantock among her influences, which tells you more about the work than any style label would.

The puzzle career was close to an accident. She grew up watching her mother build puzzles through Washington winters, but she started her professional life making greeting cards and wall art. Her first puzzle licence came around 2009 to 2010, a 500 piece Buffalo Games title called The Wish, and she assumed it was a one-off. She was represented by Duirwaigh Gallery until 2012, signed with MGL Licensing that year, and it is after that point that puzzles became the main body of her work.

That order of events matters, because it explains the thing people notice about her images.

There is a second shift worth knowing about, because it changes which of her titles you will like. "My puzzle art used to lean more towards fantasy," she has said, "but it evolved over time, and is now all about shared experiences and nostalgia." The early work is castles, myth and enchanted libraries. The later work is a station wagon packed for a family holiday, a dressmaker's table, a theatre dressing room before rehearsal. Same density, completely different emotional register.

How the images are actually made

This is the part people get wrong, and it is worth stating plainly because it changes how you read the finished puzzle.

Her images are not paintings that were photographed, and they are not photo collages. They are built on a computer. "Everything I create for puzzles is done on a computer," she has said, "but it is a combination of photographic and digital elements, hand drawing and painting." She works alone, on a Cintiq pen display with the Adobe tools, and the process starts with research rather than drawing: hours in historical archives, public domain collections, vintage scrapbooks and antique ephemera, gathering the objects before assembling them.

Her own test for whether an image is working is not compositional. "I have to love what I am creating and would personally want to buy it," she has said, and about the person building it: "I want it to be more than just a pretty image, I want it to lift them up, to inspire, to become a shared experience of happiness." That sounds like marketing copy until you notice the design consequence, which is that she keeps putting jokes and small narratives in places you only find at close range, several hours in.

The three shapes her work takes

Her catalogue gets described as "bookshelf puzzles", which is lazy. Looking across the eighteen of her titles that have passed through our range, the work falls into three distinct compositions, and they are genuinely different building experiences. This is our own categorisation, made by looking at the actual images rather than the marketing.

One title is worth singling out. Fairytale Fantasia was her first shelf image, and she has said it holds "a certain magic" for her. Everything the shelf paintings became started there, which makes it the one to own if you care about that sort of thing.

What it is like to build one

Her puzzles get called difficult. That is only half right, and the distinction is useful.

The colour in her images is saturated and varied, and it changes every few centimetres. That makes the initial sort unusually easy, because almost every piece announces which part of the picture it came from. Compare that to a photographic sky or a single-colour art puzzle, where a hundred pieces are the same and the sorting is the whole battle.

The difficulty arrives afterwards, inside each zone. Once you have your forty red pieces together, they are forty pieces of six different red objects, and you are now working on shape and small detail rather than colour. So the build has a distinct rhythm: fast and satisfying at the start, slow and absorbing in the middle, then fast again at the end when the remaining objects are obvious.

The fox

Stewart hides a small fox somewhere in her recent images. It is a personal signature rather than a puzzle feature, it is not announced on the box, and once you know about it you will not be able to stop looking.

Two things to be honest about. It is in the newer work rather than everything she has ever made, so an older title may simply not have one. And she has never published a list, so nobody can tell you which titles qualify. Finding it is the point.

Who her puzzles suit, and who they do not

They suit the puzzler who likes finding things. If the pleasure you get from a puzzle is discovery, noticing the joke on the twelfth book spine, spotting the cat, realising the shelf labels are readable, her work is built precisely for you. They also suit shared tables, because there is always something to point at, and they suit gifting to readers, sewers, gardeners, theatre people and collectors, since her subjects are usually somebody's hobby rendered lovingly.

They do not suit the puzzler who wants calm. There is no negative space in an Aimee Stewart image and nowhere for the eye to rest. If what you want from a puzzle is a quiet landscape and an hour of not thinking, this is the opposite of that, and there is no shame in knowing it. They are also a poor choice for anyone working in bad light, because the detail is genuinely small at 1000 pieces and the 500 piece versions are the sensible answer there.

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