Cobble Hill - Woodland Gathering 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A crow the colour of ink sitting over a hedgerow that contains every flower, one very large mushroom and most of the local wildlife at once. Painted by Wava Jacobchick, in portrait format, and considerably denser than it first appears.

What you are looking at

Top left, the crow, painted blue-black with every wing feather separated, perched on a bare stem. Along the right, morning glory trumpets in strong blue with pale pink throats, climbing a trunk. Through the centre, orange dahlias and rudbeckia at full open. Bottom left, a fly agaric, scarlet with white spots, under a spray of white star flowers. Bottom right, a rabbit looking out from between the leaves, easy to miss. Mid left, a small brown mouse on a stem holding a green seed pod.

Behind all of it the picture opens out: a golden meadow running back into the distance, and above that a sky of cream, apricot and pale blue with the sun low in it. That opening in the middle is the only quiet part of the image, and it is what stops the whole thing feeling airless.

What it is like to build

Take the four unmistakable things first. The crow is the only blue-black in the picture, the fly agaric the only scarlet, the morning glories the only true blue and the sky the only pale region. Four regions, four piles, and none of them is confusable with anything else.

Then the meadow, which is the easiest large area, a graded gold running from the horizon down, and it fills the middle.

Leave the foliage until last and sort it by leaf shape, not by green. This is the piece of advice that matters on this image. There are four or five distinct leaves in it: a big round one with a scalloped edge, a long strap leaf, a fine fern, a pointed red-tinged one and a small clover. At piece scale the edge of a leaf is unambiguous and the green is not, because Jacobchick has used a dozen greens and lit them all the same way.

Why the Cobble Hill cut suits a dense painting

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut, irregular shapes with no two alike. On a painting where the same green fills a third of the frame, that is the cue that keeps working after the picture has run out of them. The board carries a linen print texture and the poster is in the box, which on a portrait image this busy is genuinely useful.

Specifications

A little context

Wildlife and hedgerow painting is a large seam and it divides on one question: is the animal the subject, or is the habitat? Here it is the habitat, and the crow, the rabbit and the mouse are things you find rather than things you are shown. That makes for a slower, more searching build, and it is why these images reward being hung afterwards. For the same instinct handled as a watercolour field notebook, see Nature Journal: Spring.

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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.