Piecing life together

Mt Maunganui artist and jigsaw puzzle creator Royce McClure, 53, was in India this month assembling a 25,000 piece puzzle he designed for a Lipton Tea promotion. A veteran of over 180 puzzles and paintings, McClure entered the Guinness Book of Records three years ago for making the largest commercially available jigsaw puzzle, a 14 x 5ft work called ‘Life: The Great Challenge’, for a Spanish sports company. For his latest challenge, McClure put together a revised version of ‘The Great Challenge’ online, in April, with an additional 1,000 pieces, making it four times the size of the original puzzle. “There are not many changes, except that a logo is seen at a few places and the pieces are larger in size,” he says. McClure assembled the puzzle at Select Citywalk, Saket along with 12 winners from an online contest, who solved the puzzle the fastest. McClure started off as a fine arts painter in New Zealand and took to commercial artwork after a course in Los Angeles.