The Jigsaw Shop

The Jigsaw Shop

I find cartoon a welcome departure from "proper art". This is a design for a 1000 piece jigsaw which WAS published, unlike its contemporaries "Bond", "Friends" and "Laurela & Hardy". (See elsewhere)

Using 19 major scenarios and dozens of minor plots it was a considerable undertaking. I used visual devices familiar to this genre; an isometric layout (based on oblique lines to left and right pitched at 30° to the horizontal) rather than perspective. Scale doesn't diminish with distance in Isometric drawing and because it's a distortion of reality, layer upon layer of information can be added with minimum overlapping and obscuration - essential if you are to achieve complex content like this. The design includes lots of traits the jigsaw buff expects when sorting out the pieces; repetition to confuse ( two matching service counter motifs); starters-for-ten (the blunderbuss and cannon shots, splashes of colour groups and so on), a recurring jigsaw-piece motif throughout, and hopefully high entertainment value - the more you look the more you see. There's Gene Kelly, cheating at strip poker, surgical removal of a credit card from a wallet, an endless "service" counter with dire effects on customers, an unorthodox complaints procedure and many more. Some of it is not PC nowadays, which shows its age but still lots of fun. In design terms, the process starts with a list of major & minor incidents, translated into stick diagrams (for space allocation), fleshed out into 3 dimensions in pencil & adjusted for fit, changed by the client, re-drawn on layout paper, approved, traced down and transferred to watercolour paper, inked in and finally rendered in watercolour. No technology and lots of midnight oil. My only regret is that I gave away all my free samples of the finished jigsaw bar one, which was stolen from an exhibition so I've just an image on a file. C'est la vie. Have a look at the same title in "My Art" for the chance to zoom on the image.
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