The Curious Case of The Puzzle Emporium - Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

The Craft Behind the Conundrum

Welcome to The Puzzle Emporium, purveyors of peculiar pastimes and curious conundrums for the delightfully discerning. Our humble establishment offers a fine selection of jigsaw puzzles featuring vintage botanicals, rustic textures, and whimsically worn artefacts, all presented in compact, eco-conscious packaging.

Each puzzle is assembled under the watchful eye of the ever faithful Jenkins, who ensures your pieces are plentiful, your cardboard robust, and your hours delightfully occupied. Vegan inks, recycled board, and British sourced paper ensure that your puzzling habits remain gentlemanly, gentle to the planet, and guilt-free.

Joking aside my name is Mike James, I am an illustrator, photographer and graphic designer and I am very pleased to release my first collection of puzzles and accessories. All of the artwork has been created either from photographs, detailed 3d models, digital textures or illustrations and paintings. Everything is then blended together and edited to within an inch of it's life in Photoshop to create the beautiful images you see.

My career as an illustrator and graphic designer has been anything if not unusually exciting and varied as far as your average every day illustrator might expect. Drawing was always an obvious choice for me as it was something I took to with ease which lead me to technical illustration and photography. With an obsession for detail it was very obvious that this was a clear career route for me and I was fortunate to be able to master many traditional illustration techniques, painting and drawing with pen, pencil and brushes along with the more technical aspects of pen and ink drawing. This also allowed me to develop my interest in photography and in particular macro photography catching the smallest details of plants and insects.

Just as I was looking forward to a life of relaxing illustration, the world of CAD and illustration software exploded onto the scene and life was suddenly accelerated into a hi-tech world of keyboards, screens and printers that never worked. I spent many years drawing things that were far more complicated than they needed to be, teaching others how to do the same thing and obeying all the officious industry standards and rules that came along with it all. However, everything changed after a sudden and unexpected spell of ill health and it was time to draw a line in the sand, press the reset button and try and find a way to start again.

Suddenly, I had time on my hands, a lot of time and an irritating need to keep myself occupied. Nothing quite worked, I was simply too accustomed to solving visual problems. I needed complexity and detail. I needed something sink my teeth into... I needed Cheesecake!!

However, cheesecake aside, I began to peruse the world of jigsaw puzzles, I found myself looking for designs that required a little more mental agility whilst also offering a visually and mentally entertaining experience. It became clear that there was an opportunity to use my own artistic skills, to create richly detailed and refreshingly different jigsaw puzzle designs, something truly worthy of a long evening's effort.

And so, fuelled by ambition and that ever present cup of tea, I started designing my first range of puzzles, an endeavour that, I promise you, was far more difficult than it sounds. Having then found an amazing UK based company that could produce and ship my designs all that was left was this website and someone far more talented than myself to put it all together and make all the stuff for something called social media….!!!

That, in a nutshell, is how The Puzzle Emporium found itself accidentally entangled in the glorious pursuit of beautiful complexity.

For those of you that like to see more traditional artwork, I am in the process of creating a series of my own illustrations, so please either subscribe to our newsletter or keep and eye on our social media updates.

I do hope you enjoy doing our puzzles and look forward to hearing from you all.