Gibsons - Dreaming Of Cinque Terre 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

One of the five villages of the Cinque Terre stacked up a cliff in about fifteen colours, seen over a bank of flowers with a tall ship standing offshore. A composite rather than a straight photograph, and it is honest about being one.

What you are looking at

The village fills the left half: houses in apricot, rose, ochre, mint and terracotta piled up the rock face, each one with green or brown shutters, small balconies and washing lines. Below them a working harbour, boats pulled up a concrete slipway, a stone breakwater curving out, and people swimming in the green water inside it. A bare rock headland juts into the middle of the frame and separates the harbour from the open sea.

Out on the right, a two-masted schooner under cream sails, gulls crossing the frame, and a sunset sky of peach and lilac. Along the whole bottom edge, a bank of magenta and coral flowers in close focus with butterflies working through them.

What it is like to build

The flower bank is the fastest region and it closes the bottom edge. Nothing else in the picture is that saturated magenta, and the flowers are large in frame, so those pieces carry a whole petal rather than a fragment of one.

Do not sort the village by colour, sort it by wall. Each house is one flat colour with dark shutters punched into it, so the trick is to find a shutter and work outward: the shutter tells you which wall you are on, the wall tells you which house, and the roofline above it tells you where you are in the stack. Sorting a pile of pink pieces is hopeless, because four separate buildings are pink.

The sea is the hard third. A large graded blue with only the schooner, a few rocks and the horizon to hold on to. Leave it until the village is up, then work down from the horizon and outward from the ship.

Why the Gibsons build matters

Gibsons have been British since 1919 and print their 1000 piece range on 100% recycled board, which takes a matt finish and does not flare under a lamp. The pieces are a firm, positive fit, which counts on a picture where four houses share a colour. The finished print is in the box, and on this image you will use it.

Specifications

A little context

Italian coastal views are one of the deepest seams in the adult category and the Cinque Terre is the most worked corner of it, largely because the villages come colour-sorted. Worth knowing the difference between a documentary photograph of the place and a composite like this one: the composite has been built to give you foreground, middle and distance in clean bands, which makes for a friendlier puzzle and a less faithful postcard. For the same country handled straight, we carry Colosseum Sunrise.

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.