The Case of the Missing Puzzle Pieces (Patreon)

This is a cross-post from the Erika Moen Patreon! Patrons there got to see it seven days before it was made public.

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Ok, so a bunch of my Helioscope studiomates went out to the coast to assemble a 1,000 piece puzzle* and after many many many hours we discovered that thREE PIECES WERE MISSING.

*(I guess some people came out to the coast to actually experience, y’know, the coast, too 🙄 Here is my basically-middle-age husband dabbing against the sea.)

However, a small band of my studiomates and I are no salt-water addled fools and we stayed focused on what really mattered: The Puzzle.

So, like I said, it was missing three pieces. I wrote a note with this information for the next puzzlers but… Am I not a Professional Artiste™? Did I bring my travel watercolor case with me to not use it on this trip? Did I seriously have anything better to do with my time than leave the world (rented beach house) in better shape than I found it?

Obviously, I had no choice but to recreate the missing pieces.

I did this by sliding a sheet of watercolor paper under the open spots,  tracing the boundary of each piece, and then roughly penciling in what I  assumed the artwork would have been, connecting it to the rest of the  existing image.

In hindsight, I should have painted with the paper in that same position  between the established pieces, to ensure my colors and shapes aligned  perfectly with them. Instead, I did it The Idiot’s Way by retrieving the  paper and painting it seperately. The results are fine. They’re fine.  But I am haunted with the knowledge that I could have done them marginally better 😭

Can you even tell where the homemade pieces are? No! No, you cannot! And while you may be thinking to yourself "That is because I am looking at a photo on my phone (Or whatever) of an entire 1,000 piece puzzle at a fraction of its real size, so the hand-painted pieces just aren't going to stand out anyway", let me just assure you that they actually blended in preeeeetty well in real life, too! You had to hunt to find them. Even though they were matte and the actual puzzle pieces were glossy! They still blended in. Blent in?

Here's a guide to the missing pieces:

And then here's my recreations of the pieces, before I cut them away  from the rest of the paper they were drawn onto (which is why the  coloring goes outside the edges):

Hand-drawn pieces cut out and put into place:

I was shocked at how satisfyingly my pieces snapped into place with the legit ones.

This was a genuinely delightful experience and I am absolutely going to do this again when I cross paths with my next incomplete puzzle.

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Until the end of this month, I will cross-post my entries on both the Erika Moen Patreon and here. Starting in December, only Oh Joy Sex Toy posts will be made here, so if you wanna keep up with my personal projects like the one above, you can either become an Erika Moen patron or simply hit "follow" for free to get my public updates in your timeline.