Artist: unknown
Made by: unknown
Count: 500 pieces
Final size: 20 x 15″
Piece Type/Variety: Ribbon cut, average
Piece quality: Average
Skin irritation: Very mild
This little puzzle was nice, but some things about it bothered me. First off, there’s no manufacturer listed or artist credited, it just says “Made in China”. (Not even a title, so I gave it one that seemed appropriate). Red flag by now. All the pieces had lettering on the backs. They were made from recycled material that looks like cardstock, and felt very plasticky. Lots of reflective glare. I was mildly impressed though, that the pieces had decent thickness, and average piece shape variety. There is a poster included, and it’s actually of good size, large enough that I taped it to the wall for reference. Also, the skin pain was very minor, I was able to completely ignore it most of the time. (Does this hold up my guess that some toxic surface residue has rubbed off after many uses).
So kind of in spite of myself, I found I enjoyed the process of putting this one together. The colors are nice and bright, the design just challenging enough. The piece knobs did have rather shallow shapes, so they didn’t quite lock together, but I don’t care too much about that. What did bother me, was the the picture itself. It’s obviously digital art (which I don’t mind so much per se), and at first I thought it was just badly drawn, but the more I looked at it, the more problems I saw which convinced me this is AI art. Which I strongly object to.
First off, the tail looks bad. It does not taper into a nice spiral, but gets thicker at the end with an odd lumpy club shape. The edges don’t line up properly, and some parts of the pattern bleed into the background. Also, the fringe of spikes on the back suddenly become just lines across the whole tail, which looks weird. In certain cases I might think the spines morphing into rings on the tail would be deliberate and look cool, but in this case I don’t and it doesn’t.
The feet also look strange, are not shaped like chameleon feet, and the toes are doing weird things. Plus the stick or stem the chameleon is on doesn’t look like a plant stem at all, the leaves have this indistinct blending in-and-out in the background that makes no sense, and there are lines that are just drawn really sloppily (especially in the background).
I did think some of the patterning on the chameleon was nice, but overall it just comes across as bizarrely psychedelic. If the artwork had been better, I might have considered keeping it, but as is, this puzzle not staying in my collection.
