I’ve been writing up a lot of blog posts lately as I took multiple long breaks from the blog where I didn’t write anything about the puzzles I was doing. So now that I’m trying to be much better at regularly posting, I have a pretty large backlog of puzzles that I did, took pictures of (most of the time), and am now starting to add into the blog.

As I’m doing this, a few patterns are emerging that I’m curious to know if you also gravitate toward a certain type of puzzle image more than others. For me, I am all about:

• Christmas images
• Dog images
• Buildings
• Cat images

I am also starting to go through my massive collection of puzzles and it’s extremely clear that these four themes dominate my collection. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that of course, but I find it interesting / funny how much I collect images with these themes. Are you the same, my friends?

Some other patterns I’ve noticed in actually building puzzles is that I really enjoy collages. I have a ton of them in my collection and they are a truly happy puzzling experience for me 9 times out of 10. Every once in a while I get a collage puzzle where the images making up the collage are not crisp and clear (yes, I’m talking to you White Mountain Puzzles), and those I have a hard time completing as the blurriness can sometimes mess with my eyes and it makes assembling a lot less fun. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often.

Another pattern I’m noticing is that when I’m doing a puzzle, I really enjoy detailed images, but not overly minute levels of detail where I cannot easily pick out a section to work on. I just recently ran into this issue with the Disney-Pixar Toy Store puzzle my son Cole had picked out for me to do next. Overall, I love the image, and was really excited to do it, but I didn’t feel like there were many large areas of anything for me to latch on to and build. I started with the Incredibles family, the Cars related characters at the bottom, and the Monsters, Inc door and characters. After I finished those, I was like I don’t know what to focus on next.

There are so many tiny details in the image, and while I still love it, I just wasn’t having fun with it any more. I ultimately ended up boxing it back up and will try it again later. As my bestest puzzle pal Stacey often says. it just wasn’t the right puzzle at the right time. I will plan to return to it again sometime in the future and will hopefully have better results.

I often find super busy / detailed images to be chaotic and I don’t really like that style of puzzle image. Thinking of most Jan van Haasteren puzzles here. His cartoonish images with their 500+ tiny people crammed into a single, cluttered image makes my head want to explode most of the time. Sorry Jan! I know he’s very talented and lots of folks love his artwork. I may be in the minority, but that’s okay. Every once in a while, even my absolute favorite puzzle artist, Aimee Stewart, comes out with an image that is a bit too busy for me. It’s rare, and sometimes I will still get it because — well of course, it’s Aimee Stewart, but it may be quite some time before I actually do it. In fact, I just recently picked up this one from her and because the box said Aimee Stewart I didn’t actually look at the image before throwing it in the cart. Later on when I was showing Stacey all the fun new puzzles I had purchased that day I truly looked at it for the first time, and said, “What was I thinking?” I will give it a try at some point, but I’m not gonna lie — it’s not at the top of my Aimee to do pile! What do you guys think? Love it or not so much?

Alright, I guess I’ve rambled on long enough for one post. I would love to hear from you on your go to images and other patterns if you have any.