The Battle of Cowpens - From Concept to Finished Jigsaw Puzzle

In December of 2019 we began the journey of producing puzzles. I had been thinking of doing puzzles for a while and I decided a military history puzzle would be a good place to start. I chose this subject matter because it is rarely done, and they were the puzzles I was interested in doing.

I started the hunt for Mchezo’s first image and soon came across artist Chris Collingwood in March of 2020. I was captivated by his images! While they were all incredible, only a select few I thought would make a good challenging puzzle. Initially, I really liked his Napoleonic paintings, but I felt for our first puzzle it should be focused on an American conflict.

I contacted Chris and asked about the availability of his images, and out of the ones available, I chose The Battle of Cowpens to be our first puzzle.

Chris adds a human element to his artistic works. You can see the expressions on the faces of the Americans as they charge towards the British lines. I love his pieces and hope to do more with him in the future. (In Fact, there will be at least one more of Chris’s paintings turned into a jigsaw puzzle. It is on its way from the factory as we speak!)

While searching for images, I was also working on the next step, finding a factory to produce a puzzle of the quality I wanted. I contacted over a dozen factories, getting samples from several of them, before settling on our current factory. They’re quality was noticeably better than any other sample I received, and they were very responsive to my inquiries.

With a factory in place and an art piece chosen, we’re all done right? Well, not so fast. Now we needed a box! I turned to one of my favorite graphic designers Matt Paquette. I had worked with Matt before on a previous project and he produces amazing graphic designs. I mocked up a rough idea of what I wanted the box to look like using my poor art skills.

That wasn’t the last step! I spent some time studying the Battle of Cowpens and had to distill the history down to what would actually fit on the back of the reference sheet.

Finally, all the elements were done, and the puzzle was ordered. It arrived In late November, and has become one of our best sellers. I'm proud of the final product. It's an exciting, high quality puzzle that is the perfect start to Mchezo's "Great Battle Series." In the future I’ll talk about our other puzzles, and how we grew from one puzzle to over 20 designs.