Cobble Hill - Nature Journal: Spring 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A naturalist's spring notebook opened out flat, with the pages, the pressed flowers and most of the animals still on them. Painted by Marjolein Bastin, and the white background is the whole difficulty.

What you are looking at

Watercolour journal pages taped and pinned over a plain white ground, with the studies spilling off the edges of them. In the centre left, a framed page headed Spring, holding a small blue butterfly and a wreath of yellow vetch. Beside it a second page opening onto a meadow with a single tree.

The animals: two rabbits, one sitting up and one stretched flat; a fawn curled in the grass; a line of three ducklings; a vole at the foot of a dandelion; a wren mid-song on a stem, and a second small brown bird. The plants: crocuses in purple and white, grape hyacinth, buttercups, cowslips, dandelions gone to clock, dog rose and violets. And filling the gaps, bumblebees, ladybirds, a grasshopper, a nest of pale blue eggs and a few loose feathers.

What it is like to build

Around two hundred pieces of this puzzle are white or nearly white, and how you handle them decides your evening. Do not put them in one pile. Sort the white pieces by whatever faint mark they carry: the tip of a petal, the shadow under a taped corner, the edge of a page, a single bee's wing. Then put the genuinely blank ones aside and do not look at them again until the very end, when the shape of the hole is the only information left and there are few enough holes for that to work.

Everything else is unusually straightforward, because of how Bastin paints. She works the way a field notebook does, each subject as an isolated study with white all around it, so every rabbit, every crocus and every bee is its own little island with a clean edge. Almost nothing overlaps anything. That means once you have found a subject you can finish it completely, which is a rare pleasure at 1000 pieces.

Start with the framed page in the middle, which has hard rectangular edges and a border, then the two rabbits, then work outward subject by subject.

Why Cobble Hill, and who Bastin is

Marjolein Bastin is Dutch and has spent a career painting nature exactly as a field notebook would record it, one specimen at a time, unarranged. That habit is what makes her work suit a puzzle so well. Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut, irregular shapes with no two alike, which is what makes the white region finishable at all. Poster included, and here you will need it.

Specifications

A little context

This is one of four, one per season, built to the same recipe with different subjects: spring is nesting and new growth, autumn is fruit, fungi and migration. Together they make one of the better matched sets in the category if you like a series on a wall. Nature Journal: Autumn is in stock now. Summer and Winter are out, and worth asking us to flag when they land.

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.