Fifty three-year-old artist Royce McClure laughs and tells us that he never grew up. A native of Tauranga, New Zealand, McClure has been wracking his brains and painting divinely complex and dazzlingly colourful puzzles for kids to solve, for over 34 years now. “Since I grew up near the coastline I would dabble in painting beaches and marine life during my spare time. That passion developed into making paintings for puzzles,” explains McClure, who is in India to physically assemble a 25,000 piece puzzle that he designed for a promotion by Lipton Tea. A veteran of over 180 puzzles and paintings, McClure entered the Guinness Book of Records three years ago for making the largest commercially available jigsaw puzzle called Life: The Great Challenge, for a Spanish sports company. The 14 X 5 ft puzzle which features all forms of life on earth from marine life, plants, animals, people and to even planetary objects was made by digitally stitching together 20 paintings. “The puzzle was inspired by the idea of showing an abundance of life on earth with a rich bouquet of colours. The challenge was to erase off the large blank spaces where no changes take place,” says McClure, who started off as a fine arts painter in New Zealand and took to commercial artwork after a course in Los Angeles. “I was actually studying to be a marine biologist but my passion for painting and puzzles took over,” he explains.

For his latest challenge, McClure put together a revised version of Life: The Great Challenge online, in April, with an additional 1,000 pieces, making it four times the size of the original puzzle. “There are not many changes, except that a logo is seen at a few places and the pieces are larger in size,” he says. McClure will be assembling the puzzle at Select Citywalk, Saket, on Monday, along with 12 winners from an online contest, who solved the puzzle the fastest. “I was amazed to see that Indians were able to solve the puzzle so quickly. It requires a lot of focus and patience which is not always easy,” he adds.

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