Cobble Hill - Birds of the Forest 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Twenty-odd songbirds on a fallen gate, 1000 pieces and 67.6 x 48.9 cm finished. Cobble Hill, Canadian, random cut, from a painting by Jerry Gadamus.

What you are looking at

An old timber gate that has come down in the night's storm, lying at an angle across the frame, with birds settled all over it. Weathered grey-brown boards, rusted strap hinges, moss and lichen in the grain. Pink roses in full bloom along the bottom edge, maple leaves hanging in at the top right, and a soft green blur of forest behind everything so the birds read clean against it.

None of these birds live in Australia. It is a North American cast, and the two you will know on sight are the blue jay and the northern cardinal, that hard red bird on the right. Among the others are a black-capped chickadee, an American goldfinch, a downy woodpecker with its red cap, an eastern bluebird and a wren. If you grew up on Australian birds, this is the first time most of them will have been in front of you at any size.

Every feather was airbrushed freehand. Jerry Gadamus works with an airbrush and no stencils and no paintbrush, which is the part worth sitting with once you know it. Look at the barring on the sparrow's wing or the black and white ladder on the woodpecker and then remember that none of it was masked off.

What it is like to build

The birds are twenty separate easy wins and they are the smaller half. Each one is a distinct silhouette in a colour combination that appears nowhere else in the box, so they go in fast. Do them first, because they also pin down where everything else sits.

The gate is the work. Weathered timber at a consistent angle, all of it the same grey-brown. Sort it by grain direction and by what a piece carries: a nail hole, a hinge, a split, a patch of lichen, the edge of a board. Those are your landmarks, and there are enough of them that this never becomes hopeless, unlike a plain sky.

The green background is the genuinely hard part. It is deliberately out of focus, so there is no detail to sort by at all, only tone. Lay those pieces out from light to dark before you place any of them, and leave the whole band until last.

The roses are the reward. Save a few for when the green has worn you down.

Why the Cobble Hill cut is different

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut: irregular shapes, no grid, no two pieces the same. On a picture with a large area of near-featureless green, that is exactly what stops the background becoming interchangeable, because shape does the work colour cannot. Linen print texture on the board, and a random cut does not count out neatly, so skip the piece count.

Specifications

A little context

Bird boards like this one are a fixture of the category for a practical reason: a painter can put twenty unrelated, high-contrast subjects into a single frame without the picture falling apart, and every one of them is a small, satisfying finish for the person building it. It is the same reason dog and cat collages work. The difference here is the background, which is doing something harder than most.

More like this: our Animals range, 1000 piece puzzles, and everything from Cobble Hill.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.