El Dorado Students’ Plan Comes Together

Andrea Rollins slowly sighed as she looked for the first time at the completely assembled giant jigsaw puzzle she and about 10 other El Dorado High School art students have been making since December.

“This is the first time we’ve seen it totally put together,” Rollins, 18, of Yorba Linda said as she proudly inspected the 25-by-20-foot puzzle that depicts a sailboat. “In one way, it’s great, because it’s done and it worked out fine. But now it’s like empty-nest syndrome. It’s done, so now what do we do?”

The Pacific Coast Gas Assn. of Burlingame, which provides leadership training for Western U.S. gas companies, commissioned the Placentia school’s art department to make the 250-piece puzzle, which attendees of an upcoming conference in Northern California will be asked to reassemble as a team-building exercise. In exchange, the department received about $500 in equipment and will get the puzzle back for future use.

Lyn Berman, a Southern California Gas Co. employee who is helping plan the convention, said she asked El Dorado’s art department to take on the project because her daughter attended the school about 10 years ago.

While the students were making the puzzle, there wasn’t a space large enough to lay it out entirely. So the students hoped for the best Thursday as they shuffled around a room on their hands and knees, nervously hooking together their brightly colored masterpiece for the first time.

The puzzle fit in the room just fine. But there were still questions about whether it would assemble into the intended sailboat. It did, and the students and their teachers breathed a sigh of relief.

“Through this whole process, problems would come up that I hadn’t thought about, and at times I felt this would never work,” said Bill Wright, chairman of the art department. “But here it is.”

The process of making the puzzle also turned into a team exercise for students, who worked separately on the project at different times throughout the school day, art teacher Doug Thompson said.

Students divided into groups and drew the sailboat on sheets of paper taped together. Then they marked the puzzle-piece pattern over the drawing and cut out the pieces. Using the paper patterns, they cut out foam-core pieces and assembled small sections of the puzzle to make sure the pieces fit together. They then painted the pieces and again assembled sections of the puzzle to make sure the pieces matched.

After countless hours of cutting out puzzle pieces, trying to stump would-be assemblers with tricky shapes became Robert Lundgren’s favorite pastime.

“I would cackle madly when I made evil pieces,” Lundgren, 18, of Santa Ana said. “I made some with straight edges so they look like edge pieces, but they really go in the middle.”