Photo of the Week: The Testing Puzzle

This one was kind of fun. In case you don’t recognize what that is, it’s a standardized “fill in the bubbles with a No. 2 pencil” test. Like the SAT, GRE, or what you may have to take to get some jobs. I created it mainly as a test shot for submitting it for the cover of TIP magazine following their recent call for photos. Also, it seemed like a neat idea.

Since pre-employment tests aren’t a popular subject for jigsaw puzzles, I made it myself. I started by going to a children’s resale shop and finding a puzzle that was about the right size. Finding the right size puzzle was actually the hardest part; most were too big. But once I had it Sam and I put it together:

Then I took a blank answer sheet like this one:

And then I married the two together by flipping the puzzle over, smearing some “Mod Podge Matte-Mat” on it, and laying the answer sheet down. I think regular craft glue would work just as well. I pressed it as flat as I could, rubbed out all the wrinkles and bubbles, then let it dry. When it was dry I took an exacto knife and, working from the bottom up, started to cut out the puzzle pieces:

This was tedious, but I quickly realized that I didn’t need to cut out ALL of the pieces, just the ones I wanted loose for the final shot. Speaking of which, I arranged the pieces and took the final pic in a DYI light box using two halogen shop lights and a tripod:

I’m still not 100% happy with it and may play around with it some more (maybe try adding a hand holding one of the puzzle pieces to the shot), but it was fun. I also may try doing it with some other kinds of documents (color pie charts, etc.) to create something more generic.

Published by

5 thoughts on “Photo of the Week: The Testing Puzzle

  1. I like it. I saw the TIP announcement and was hoping you would submit something. BTW, now that I have your SS#, what is your DOB again? I don’t have a job anymore so I was thinking of stealing another person’s identify.

  2. Well, I can tell you that my DOB wasn’t yesterday, because that’s not my SSN. It’s the one from some poor guy’s wallet I stole.

  3. This is totally cool…but, clearly, you have too much time on your hands!

  4. Did you upgrade your light box? This one looks much more advanced than the one you built and showed a while back.

  5. Brent, I can provide a long list of witnesses that say this isn’t the case. 🙂 It actually took me weeks to go from idea to photo on this one.
    David, yeah. That one is built from foam board following this tutorial. I actually built a third one last night following this one. I’ve yet to find one I really like in terms of how it handles the light.

Comments are closed.