For my second little puzzle I decided I should probably make the most of the upcoming Christmas holiday and create something appropriately themed. I enjoyed the small amount of painting I did on the ghosts and wanted to try more, and I figured a snowman was a fairly easy place to start!
![](https://www.puzzlingbeats.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Snowman-1024x1024.jpg)
One of the things I love about hand cut wooden puzzles is the concept of “line cutting” where your cuts follow the picture. This makes solving them quite a lot more challenging! I wanted to do this in my puzzle which meant I needed to place my snowman in the same position each time. A problem I solved by using the laser cutter to create a template which I could use to sketch the outline of the snowman to paint over.
I also love multi-piece whimsies which I hadn’t seen until recently, so I designed a few of those too! You can see that I placed the bauble so that it ends up being 2 colours, split almost perfectly along the edge of the snowman (which inevitably varies a little because it’s hand painted, but pretty close).
![](https://www.puzzlingbeats.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/F1860010-2BB1-4E9D-966D-2B80BCFA81FF_1_105_c.jpeg)
![](https://www.puzzlingbeats.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/BD09D1C8-1F94-4F36-838B-49B2EB1AD0FC_1_105_c.jpeg)
![](https://www.puzzlingbeats.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/28991EE7-7F90-47B9-8742-D90112EE9650_1_105_c.jpeg)
![](https://www.puzzlingbeats.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/B05E6BBD-FBA8-41BE-8C3D-5278F28E9ECD_1_105_c.jpeg)
After I created the first one I realised it was going to be a little too easy to solve, so I decided to paint the back too! This did a good job of increasing to difficulty even though the snowman pieces were fairly easy to identify still. It’s also much easier to clean the soot marks off of a painted surface than the bare wood.
I soon had a little snowman army who all found their way to new homes before Christmas 😁