Pet Shop by Eric Dowdle – Dowdle Puzzles – 300 pieces

This 300 piece puzzle was surprisingly difficult, and although the finished image looks as if it would be easy to pick out certain sections – it wasn’t! Almost every piece looked quite blue, and it went much more slowly than usual for a puzzle with only 300 pieces.

Still, it was excellent quality, and I enjoyed the challenge of it. I normally don’t have to pay as much attention to minute details in a puzzle of this size – this one was packed with animals and cages, and you had to concentrate and focus intensely – it was lots of fun!

It’s been several years since I put together a Dowdle image, and even then it was on a MasterPieces puzzle, not the Dowdle brand. I find Eric Dowdle’s artwork to make for challenging puzzles no matter the piece count; but I love his symmetry, precision, and color choices even though the images themselves aren’t easy to assemble.

My last Dowdle brand puzzle was back in 2020, and reading back through it I found I was annoyed that there was only piece shape (even though Cats Around the World was a wonderfully fun image) – thankfully this one had a nice variety of shapes and was very good quality all around. My only issue was the very shiny finish; it made assembly under my artificial lighting difficult.

My son loved this little sign, it was the first thing he noticed when he looked at the box image. That husky looks like he’s staring down whatever animal or person he’s about to go after – those blue eyes are so disconcerting!

The rabbit just hanging out and casually holding onto his carrot made me smile, there’s something just so silly about it. 🐰🥕

My regular readers know I’m not much of a cat person at all, but I loved the names on this cage – Oscar and Tartar Sauce. Who do you think is the grumpy one in the back? My guess is that’s Oscar. For some reason that grumpy face and the name Tartar Sauce just don’t seem to go together.

There was a legend on the back of the poster as well, with a detail or two about each of the species featured in the image. Some of it was new information – and you know I love educational puzzles that teach me something. Did you know that some koi fish have a lifespan of over 200 years? Amazing!

But the most interesting fact I learned was given about hamsters. Many people know that animals are diurnal (active during the day) or nocturnal (active at night), and some are cathemeral (active during both daylight and darkness). There is a fourth classification though; some animals, like hamsters, are “crepuscular” – which means they are most active during the twilight hours. Perhaps it isn’t as interesting to you as it was to me, but I found it fascinating, and did a bit of research into it. There are 534 species that are crepuscular!

Sorry, got a little off track there…back to the puzzle. Pet Shop was an entertaining, difficult, very good quality puzzle with an image packed full of fun animals to find and assemble. I enjoyed it very much. 🧩💚