Butterfly Jigsaw Puzzles

Which butterfly puzzle should you start with?

Start with Monarch Butterflies on Milkweed or Swallowtail on a Purple Thistle. Both put one strong pair of colors in the middle, so the first few minutes go quickly and the blurred background can wait. Orange and black wings stand out against the pink milkweed, and the yellow swallowtail sits right on top of a purple crown.

Blue Morpho on a Leaf works the same way. Its wings shift from turquoise to deep cobalt, and the water droplets on the leaf make little round highlights you can pick out of the darker greens before the rainforest closes in around them.

Why are the busy scenes harder?

Because small wings repeat. In Butterflies on a Mud Puddle dozens of yellow and white butterflies crowd a sunny riverbank, and some of them overlap. The dark body lines and antennae tell one insect from the next, so check those before you trust the color.

Butterflies over a Lavender Field is kinder. The lavender rows run back towards the horizon and give the bottom half a steady pattern. Lay those purple bands first and the small butterflies above them sort easily by wing shape. Painted Ladies in a Meadow hands you red poppies and white daisies to begin with, and the blue sky can sit untouched until the flowers are done.

Gardens, glass and a specimen board

Three of the pictures are built around a place rather than a single insect. In Butterfly Garden with Zinnias the biggest flower heads make good anchors, and the butterflies sit at different depths, so keep the near wings apart from the soft ones further back. The Butterfly House Greenhouse has glass panes and metal frames that give you a grid before the plants start to overlap. The Butterfly Specimen Board is the tidiest of all. Each pinned butterfly is its own small job, matched by wing symmetry, with warm wood grain filling the gaps. More flower scenes live in the Gardens category.

How many pieces suit a butterfly picture?

For most of these, somewhere between 104 and 300 pieces works best. At 104, which takes most people about 20 minutes, a monarch or a swallowtail still covers several pieces and its markings are easy to read. Go much higher and the soft backgrounds take over, so a lot of the game turns into matching green.

Peacock Butterfly Wing Close-Up breaks that rule. The whole picture is tiny scales and eye spots, with dark veins splitting the wing into sections. Begin at an eye spot and work outwards ring by ring. It stands up well at 600 or 1000 and would sit happily among our hard jigsaw puzzles.

Good picks for younger players

• Butterfly on a Child's Hand, one bright butterfly resting on an open hand in a flower garden.
• Unicorn and Butterflies, a unicorn in a sunny meadow with wings scattered all around it.
• Rainforest Butterflies by a Stream, for older kids happy to follow a winding stream past mossy stones.

Try 24 or 36 pieces with a 5-year-old. A 9-year-old will usually manage 80 or 104 without help.