Throughout 2026 I had the lovely opportunity to create Artifact Puzzle’s 2026 Christmas jigsaw! The illustration gave me the opportunity to combine the ideas of a Gingerbread Castle with a traditional Christmas market, and there are a lot of fun festive details dotted around to find.

Despite how my work is perceived, I feel as though thus far I haven’t had much of a chance to create many traditional ‘wimmelbild’ pieces. A lot of my work is centred around other themes (i.e. films), and then the details are secondary/beholden to that. Whereas with something like this, I’m explicitly setting out to have those details from the outset with less of a rigid framework.

The brief said that working in a landscape format would be preferred. I said “Sure, no problemo”.

There was, in fact, a slight problemo.

I exaggerate for comedic effect – not so much a problem, just the hurdle in that I initially found it surprisingly tricky to create a sprawling castle environment whilst also maintaining an engaging, landscape composition. Anytime I draw castles (which I seem to have a penchant for), I feel as though I work upwards, rather than outwards. Especially with fantasy castles. I want tall towers and turrets. I want a castle on a hill, ringed by a moat. And I quickly discovered none of this was possible in a horizontal format. Tall turrets would extend off the canvas, and if I scaled the castle down then I would lose the ability to draw characters in coherent detail.

Of course, none of this was a particular issue once I figured out the idea that the ground levels could be tiered, and also that we didn’t need to see the skyline within the artwork. I just found it interesting to hit an unexpected roadblock so soon. A nice reminder that there is still uncharted territory for me when it comes to working in different formats.

Working digitally is always quite tedious for me. A necessary evil that can only take me so far before I need to switch to pencil. And switch to pencil I did! I used a grid to keep me in line with the digital sketch I had on my screen, and let the pencil figure out some of the more specific details on the page.

I then used a lightbox, as usual, to ink the linework on a fresh sheet of paper. I’m still unsure as to how useful it is for me to pencil the entire drawing so intently before inking – as I am essentially creating the artwork twice. But my limited experience so far seems to indicate that I can create the linework quicker if I have something fleshed out to work on top of, rather than having to pause and try and figure out the intricacies of the lines straight away in ink.

Something I have started doing is to draw all of the solid lines in the artwork first, and then add all of the shading-dots afterwards. By working this way, and by scanning the artwork in in-between, I can use the magic wand tool to flood select areas and speed up the process of colouring the artwork (Provided the scanning process is smooth and I can overlay one scan on top of the other without the lines being misaligned).

With the lines drawn, the colouring process went absolutely swimmingly, and I’m very delighted with how it all came out. I think it feels (very appropriately) warm and magical, and I’m much looking forward to people being able to experience it as a jigsaw! Big thanks to Maya and Aviela for helping shape this and for putting it out in the world.

If you want to nab yourself a copy, you can find them on Artifact Puzzles website here!