The Art of Making Nonograms

I have posted a few times about playing Nonogram apps.  They are technically puzzles and not games, but check out these previous posts: this one from Nov 2020, my post on completing Picross Survival, and my recent post about Nonogram Katana.

Focusing on Nonogram Katana, they have over 100,000 puzzles submitted by users, suggesting that you can create your own puzzles.  About two years ago, I did one black & white puzzle with a pattern shaped like Florida, but since then we've been doing a lot more of the colored puzzles, so I thought it would be fun to try designing some of those.  The app is seamless when it comes to adding your own content: just go to My Nonograms, click + to add a new one, choose a size and color scheme, then you can use the palette to choose colors and use the controls you're already familiar with to fill out the pattern.  Here is a simple one of mine:

It's just a basic spiral with four colors.  Once you save it, you can play it and see what it looks like as a puzzle.  

 

There are a lot of ways you might adjust it after the first draft.  Maybe you weren't expecting it to come out as such a complex pattern and you need to go back and combine some of the dots.  Or maybe you don't like those colors as much as you thought you would.  

When you go to save it, the app will flag the puzzle if it does not have a unique solution.  This is interesting.  If you think about it, a pattern of red-blank-blank-red will look the same as a pattern of red-blank-red-blank.  Either way the number cues will show a red 1 and another red 1, and you can't know where the spaces are.  I've found that these can be solved by adding a neutral color (like light gray or a different shade of red in this example) in between, or by moving one pixel over by a space.  red-red-blank-red (red 2, red 1) is different from red-blank-red-red (red 1, red 2), problem solved.

I got flagged when I doing a pattern based on a red airmail stamp, with a warning that said the app does not accept single-color puzzles and I should change it to a black & white puzzle.  This was solved by introducing a darker red color and only using it in a few places for shading.

Another interesting twist is that you can set a color as the background color and then the dots will be filling in all the other colors.  We have seen a lot of posted puzzles that have this kind of reverse logic.  It's a good change of pace.  For that red airmail stamp, I could have set red as the background and then the dots would be just the white parts and a few dark red shading lines.

After doing about a dozen of these, I tried making one that looks like Anne's dog Dory.  It was a lot harder than copying from a still image.  We did get a good profile photo as a reference, and had the real dog sitting next to us.  Sizing was an issue here.  I started with 25x25 then found that as I drew it from left to right, some of space was not being used.  The app lets you resize it, so first we reduced it to 18x18, then I wanted to add a collar so I expanded it down to 18x20.  What the app does not have is a way to center the current pattern when changing the canvas size.  It only adds or removes columns from the right and bottom.

We think the image came out really good.  It took a lot of fussing and fudging with the dots to make it work.  The puzzle itself when you hit Play was much more difficult than we thought it would be, but it was funny how you could see the nose and eye right away, even in that clog of numbers.

As a final twist, Anne asked if we could print it out.  It seemed unlikely to be interesting, as it will either be tiny or it will be an obvious series of big colored squares.  But she was able to print it from her tablet, and the tablet chose "4x6 index card" as the correct page size, and result was adorable.  She ended up laminating it and adding it to her cabinet of dog collectibles.

 So this somehow went from being a pixel art puzzle to a craft project.  Fun.

This turned out to be more of an adventure that I could have predicted.  I will keep making more, but I only have time to do two or three a week, which is okay since you're only allowed to submit three puzzles in a 12 hour period.  I will keep doing animals, stamps, and an occasional molecular diagram.  Who knows how big or complicated they may get, though I personally don't care for these puzzles once they get over 35x35, considering the eye strain issues I've been having.

So there's certainly an art here.  Let's see where it goes from here ...

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