Illustration pen pal: puzzle

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My illustration pen pal loaned me another Griffin and Sabine book, and I returned it with a letter and a puzzle.

I already had a mandala design from a workshop years ago, so I started there. I made some tweaks and printed it out to decide what the colors should be like. Thanks to radial symmetry, I could get four different looks on the same sheet.

photo of mandala printed on regular paper, folded lines dividing it into quarters, and each quarter has a different version of color treatment
Top: white background, rainbow shapes on left and metallics on right
Bottom: black/white shapes on rainbow background left, metallic background right 

photo of chip board painted white and taped to Cricut mat
Puzzles are made of chipboard (what hardcover books use, a little more hardcore than a cereal box)
Let's feed that into the Cricut and see what happens

photo of puzzle design drawn in black and shapes cut out by the Cricut, still taped to the Cricut mat
Good news: the Cricut can handle drawing all the lines at this size,
and it will successfully cut out all those puzzle shapes

close up photo of cut out puzzle pieces, the blade has frayed a lot of the edges so the surface is not at all smooth. This is pretty disappointing.
Bad news: all those frayed edges are not gonna work for me

photo of second puzzle attempt made from paper instead of chipboard. Looks a lot smoother.
Second attempt: puzzle re-drawn and re-cut on two sheets of cover stock
glued together instead of chipboard. A little less solid, but much smoother!

photo of final puzzle, drawn, cut, and colored in; all white background, left half colored in rainbow colors and right half colored with gold and silver
An additional sheet was added to the back so the puzzle sits inside a contained frame.
Because radial symmetry is a pain in a puzzle, I split it down the middle and
colored the left with rainbow colors and the right in gold and silver

detail photo of mandala design

photo of puzzle in box on top of the book to be mailed; puzzle pieces have been removed from the frame and put in a plastic baggie
I removed all the puzzle pieces from the frame and put them in a plastic baggie,
then wrote my letter inside the empty frame. I'm not a complete monster, so
as a hint I wrote my letter in rainbow colors on the left and gold and silver on the right


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