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!
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).
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 😁