Category Archives: Jigsaw Puzzles

Commissioned paintings, Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Nancy Cherry Eifert, New Painting Post, Washington State Parks, Wildlife

The Mount St Helens project

I’ve been working on this project since May, but the painting didn’t really start until August. I’ll bet over a million brush strokes! I’m close to finishing painting 24 images for the big revamping of the Washington State Park’s visitor center at Mt St Helens National Monument. I’m told it’s one of the biggest interpretive projects ever for Washington State Parks.

I’ve already made some art for this fantastic park before, but that was a series of outside wayside panels for the US Forest Service placed around the mountain, plus a big painting that we eventually made into a puzzle. This current effort is at Silver Lake on the park’s west side, a big visitor center built right after the eruption in 1980. I’m working with EDX in Seattle who did the designs and asked me to do the art. Sure glad they did – it’s been interesting.

For this post, I’ll focus on just the wetlands tabletop, 17 feet long and 4 feet wide, it’s one of the most complex visitor center exhibits I’ve painted. Other parts of the project will be posted soon.

I have few finished photos of this, but I did get the tabletop main painting scanned – a whopping 4.5 gigabits of data that will be printed on aluminum (I think).

Drawing and the beginnings of the painted art.
Final painting for the tabletop, about 17′ wide.
Part of the left side of the tabletop.

The tabletop has all sorts of lift lids showing hidden critters beneath them. There are spinners that show the eruption, another with the evolution of Silver Lake. It’s a very busy thing and I’m hoping kids will love it.

On my next post, I’ll get into the smaller pieces of art, then the second wall (an entirely different theme and painting 14′ long).

Nancy on the boardwalk at Silver Lake. Enough wood here to build several houses, and it’s in good shape – goes on for half a mile. The volcano is straight ahead but still 25m away.

In case you don’t remember what the mountain looks like, here’s a puzzle we did some years ago for it.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, National Park Service

Crater Lake National Park – New Jigsaw Puzzle

Another jigsaw puzzle arrived –  Crater Lake National Park. 500 pieces, a reference poster inside, new smaller box. We printed this one a very long time ago and I’ve always liked it. So popular we’ve decided to bring it back.  Now, we’ve put it in a new smaller box (easy storage and shipping), added a reference poster and on the design I scanned a piece of my hiking bandana for the bottom border.

Originally, this painting was all about those beautiful yet stark pines around the Caldera Rim. Those are whitebark pines, a  high-altitude keystone species that is now about to be listed as a threatened tree. And so, we’re highlighting that event here with a new edition of the lake and whitebark pines are in peril!

These puzzles are available for $18.95 each in our web store here. Just click this link.   Shipping is only $5 per destination, no matter how many different puzzles you buy, and now we have six new ones in the past couple of months.

So what’s the deal about whitebark pines? Why are these iconic and painterly trees in trouble? It’s a tragic combination of events that have come together in a perfect storm. An introduced fungal disease called white pine blister rust, Climate Change that has stressed the trees and allowed bark beetles to access the inner bark. Put the three factors together and it trouble for these trees. Whitebark pine has the largest distribution of any five-needle white pine in North America, but the whitebark pine’s health is deteriorating rapidly across its range, particularly in the Rocky Mountains, Pacific Northwest, and northern Sierra Nevada. In short, the forests I’ve loved my entire life are changing beyond measure and will effect not just the trees, but an entire ecosystem.

Like to read more, go to my friends at the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Wildlife

Great Salt Lake – a new jigsaw puzzle

A pallet full of new jigsaw puzzles arrived yesterday. This painting was commissioned by The Nature Conservancy for the Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve in Utah, and now we’ve partnered with them to produce a puzzle of the image. The finished puzzle above is the very first one put together by Kody in Salt Lake City and the printing looks very good indeed.

Below is the box back has a species key like all the rest of our puzzles, and now there’s a reference poster inside the box. These are the new smaller boxes for easy storage and shipping.

This is the fifth new puzzle for us in the past few months, a serious leap of faith of the future. We could have bought a new car, but what the heck! We’re investing in us instead.

Thanks for reading.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, New Painting Post

Shouting Out: Four New Jigsaw Puzzles now available

All these puzzles are available in our secure webstore with the others, same price $18.95 each and $4.99 shipping on as many as you can buy in one order to one address. 

Shouting out, because we didn’t have ANY summer puzzle season since all National Park Visitor Centers were closed – you know, where most people buy our puzzles!

But now: Just in time for the holidays, we have four new puzzles. And not just new puzzles, but new designs, smaller boxes for easier storing and mailing as gifts, and a free reference poster included in each one. The reference poster makes it easy for two people to work on a puzzle at once, and each can have a reference image (the box and the poster). The boxes are now about 60% of the size of the old ones, but the puzzles are still 500-pieces, 18″ x 24″ finished size, same sized pieces and clean cuts on the pieces. It’s a nice improvement, and we’re aiming to remake all our puzzles like this as titles run out.

Puzzle pieces in a bag, reference poster, box top and interpretive stuff on the box back. Species list and even my ink drawings on the box sides.

Olympic High Country is a painting that’s never been seen or used before for a puzzle. It was painted because this place means a lot to me, and those rare endemic animals and flowers of our local mountains are really interesting. It’s a good image for a puzzle. Here’s the link to the puzzle in the store.

Killer Whales of the Salish Sea

I painted this Orca Whales image for a park on San Juan Island, and the complexity of the background instantly made it a candidate for a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s the link to this one in our store.

Two Sides of the Sea

A new design of our best-selling image. This colorful mural is now enhanced with the reference poster and smaller box, just like the others.

Old-growth Forests of the Pacific Northwest

The fourth image is a redesign of my Mount Rainier mural at the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center on the southeast side of the park. We’re at the end of our run and thought we’d start fresh with this instead of just reprinting it. Same reference poster and smaller box as the others. The detail in the foreground makes for a really complex and entertaining puzzle that’ll keep you up all night.

All these puzzles are available in our secure webstore with the others, same price $18.95 each and $4.99 shipping on as many as you can buy in one order to one address.  Again, here’s the link to all four in our store, plus the others everyone seems to love.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals

Planning New Jigsaw Puzzles

Don’t start ordering just yet, but we’re planning on at least EIGHT new jigsaw puzzles in the near future. I’ve been in the design process for the past few weeks and we’d like to share some now to get a bit of feedback. These are new in every way, smaller boxes, a free poster inside each box along with the puzzle. They’re the same sized puzzles, 18″x 24″, but the box is smaller to help with shipping and storage – storage for us especially as our little warehouse gets pretty packed sometimes.

El Malpais National Monument, New Mexico. This painting is on their park map and also as a visitor center exhibit.

After years of making interpretive puzzles from my park murals, we thought it was time to change it up, so here are the first designs. No name on the one below, but it’s Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco. This painting is on their park map.

Point Reyes National Seashore, Northern California
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.

And this one is from Mesa Verde in Colorado where the original painting hangs in the old historic museum. My dad worked here many years ago, so it has double meaning to me to see it in print in a new life.

I find it interesting how these things have found a way into my life. When we started making these many years ago,  I never suspected here I’d be in 2020 making boxes of cut-up cardboard that people would collect, a LOT of people. And judging by the email we get, they are put back together again and again.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com, down the right side of the home page.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Nancy Cherry Eifert, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Posts about other stuff, Wildlife

Eifert Painting on the Ferry

Yesterday we were coming home to Port Townsend on our little ferry. Parked on the car deck and walked up to confront one of my paintings in jigsaw puzzle form right on the table in front of us. Perfect, said Nancy and proceeded to put the thing together.  I mostly watched a gloriously calm sunset after a big blow in the morning that shut the boat down, but still added a few pieces to the effort. This is a painting I did for Mount Rainier National  Park years ago and is still installed there, the main attraction to the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center. It’s also still a puzzle – and who knows how many of these things are floating around the world. Thousands.

Now, I know it’s a bit of a stretch to say this is actually ‘public art’, but bear with me. I first figured out how to put my better National Park art on puzzles in the 1990’s, first with a company from Germany, then we did it ourselves through a great group called Impact Photographics. It takes a pile of doubt or at least a credit score. Various others have made puzzles, too, and I’m guessing we’ve published over 80 different images. Currently, Nautilus Puzzles from California is actually making them out of real laser-cut wood that cost as much as some of my early paintings did!

These days, we’re not as aggressive with this, but still supply them to parks and stores. We once found one in Hawaii at the Pahoa Farmer’s Market under a pile of used clothes and books.

I’m not here to advertise buying puzzles, but instead to just say that this sure has been a wide and complex life. I have painting projects going on right now about restoring Northwest salmon, a bison mural in South Dakota, a Florida project involving dolphins and octopus, nesting terns and sharks. I’m proud to say I’m sponsored by a great backpacking equipment company called Six Moon Designs that help get me out there in comfort, and by a truly wonderful partner. Nancy keeps it all running behind the scenes as well as on the road – or on the ferry.

I guess what this post is all about is for me to just say thanks to everyone for all of this. It takes an amazing number of consistently interested people to keep our little lifestyle going for all these decades. I wish I could give back, but with the next paintings in progress, maybe I am.

You can also see this post and all the rest coming up by simply adding your email to our list here – right side, down a bit.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Waysides, Wildlife

A New Puzzle for the North Olympic Salmon Coalition

A new puzzle arrived for our local salmon restoration group and we high-jacked a few of them for us. I guess you could call it a ‘Limited Edition’. This non-profit puts restoration projects together with partners with funds to help Olympic Peninsula watersheds, and they’re just about the best bunch of folks we know around here.

Last year I did some art and designs for a series of wayside panels that completed a major habitat restoration in the estuary of Discovery Bay on the Olympic Peninsula (that’s the bay in the background of the puzzle). They decided that a jigsaw puzzle might be a perfect way to spread the word about this and raise some money. Very progressive attitude, and a perfect way to showcase some of this art.  I did the design, and below is the box back – learn about salmon and restoration, all in one.

Here’s the box front. I used three paintings, melded them together and I think it’s a fairly difficult puzzle. 

And below is one of the paintings installed. Thousands of salmon migration barriers are on streams and rivers in the Northwest. This project opened up two streams and help these fish return to spawn a next generation.  NOSC removed 1900 tons of rock, 425 tons of contaminated soils,  added 3200 feet of a community waterline and lots more. It was a big project – and I was proud to be a small part of it by providing some interpretive art. We also handled the fabrication and printing, all in a day’s work for me.

If you’d like a puzzle, you can order it here on our website. Or, call Nicole O’Hara at NOSC, (360) 379-8051 and get one as a donation to this great group. Then, if you’re local, get out here and have a look at all this.

Thanks for reading my stuff this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, New Painting Post, Wildlife

The Salish Sea – a New Jigsaw Puzzle

A new puzzle arrived  yesterday, called The Salish Sea. This is a section of a painting I did for the Whidbey Island Land Trust and shows the rather amazing underwater (and normally unseen by us) ecosystem just offshore between Port Townsend and Coupeville, Washington. There are a LOT of critters stuffed in this painting and it should make for a good puzzle. Below is the box back, as interpretive as I could get it. The puzzle is 24″ x 18″ and has 500 pieces. 

This place, a stark and diverse shoreline, gets the full brunt of storms and waves coming right down the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It’s part of the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area and has a harsh vibrancy about it that I just love. It was fun to paint.

People send us these photos from time to time.

All these images enlarge in your browser if you click them.

You can order from our online store here: or by emailing us if you want to send a check here: larry@larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Waysides, Wildlife

Wildlife of the Old-growth – a new jigsaw puzzle for Christmas

Click the image to enlarge it in your browser.

Finally, a new interpretive jigsaw puzzle is here, all 43 cases in our little warehouse. This is a really fun puzzle, I think, with lots of hidden critters, a story being told and lots of details on the box. As usual, we put the full story on the box back, an interpretive essay and key. Few commercial puzzles have all this stuff on the box, but I never thought it should JUST be a puzzle, but more an experience. If you’d like to purchase it, along with the others we current have in stock, click  here. If you buy more than one, it helps our freight costs – these are heavy.

This painting was a commission, along with a bunch of others, for the Whidbey – Camano Island Land Trust, just to the north of us here in Port Townsend Washington. High on a bluff above the ocean, Admiralty Inlet Natural Area is a preserve with ancient trees and a restored natural prairie. This is also part of the much bigger and very beautiful Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve. The high winds here above the Strait of Juan de Fuca have made this a battered forest, creating strange gnarly old-growth Douglas-fir. It’s a fitting place to paint a jigsaw puzzle.

Again, here’s the link to purchase the new puzzle.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.