Deep Dive: Monsterpiece Mashup by Jason Panda

Artist: Jason Panda

Puzzle Design: Jasen Robillard

Dimensions: 42.4 cm x 31.6 cm

Piece Count: ~575

Difficulty: 5 out of 5

About the Artist

Jason & Jasen first crossed paths at the University of Waterloo, living in residence at St. Paul's College, where a friendship quietly took root over shared meals, playful pranks, philosophical campfire chats, and mostly harmless adventures together. Their relationship reflects a particular kind of camaraderie that only university life and regular check-ins produce.

Professionally, Jason is a multi-disciplinary artist, photographer, and educator based in the Waterloo Region of Ontario. He holds a Joint Honours in Fine Arts and Mathematics — a pairing that perfectly explains his signature style: organic tessellations, interlocking patterns of animals and fluid forms built on geometric precision, inspired by M.C. Escher. 

As President of the Kitchener-Waterloo Society of Artists and a long-time educator, Jason treats art as a tool for civic belonging. His Belong Together initiative grew from a local pandemic response into a public art movement, distributing over 19,000 tiles across the region. He also develops escape rooms through Complex Rooms and creates experiential learning environments designed to foster connection and collaboration. 

Links

Jason Panda's website and Belong Together Tiles

Complex Rooms

All the Little Monsters: How I Learned to Live with Anxiety by David A. Robertson

Jasen's Substack Series on Avoiding the Tragedy of Monsters

Piecing Together Frankenstein’s Monster

A Vampire's Redemption

Harnessing our Passionate Hot Heads

The Alchemy of Shadow Integration

Jasen's Puzzle Design Notes

The Seed of an Idea

A few close friends of mine regularly meet at the movie theatres to "scare ourselves straight". Following the thrills and chills of the horror film, we often spend the rest of the night over pints picking apart the themes and the underlying meaning. 

After watching Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things and Robert Eggers' Nosferatu in close succession, I kept returning to the same observation: horror, at its most profound, is not really about terror. It's about the paradoxical hope and peril of transformation. The monster is nearly always a moral, cautionary endpoint. In such cases, the monster is a symbol of moral decay without redemption, a local minimum in a landscape of suffering.

And from there, these questions emerged.

What if these weren't only cautionary tales? 
What if these movies were maps to untold redemption stories?

These questions echoed in an old Cherokee teaching I came across shortly thereafter — the tale of two wolves fighting inside every person. One wolf is fed by anger, envy, resentment, ego. The other by joy, compassion, generosity, truth. The wolf that thrives is the one you feed. That parable became the emotional centre of the entire puzzle: a hound of love and a wolf, coiled together in a yin-yang embrace.

David Whyte's poem "Sweet Darkness" also crossed my radar at exactly the right moment. Its central invitation — to enter the dark willingly, to trust that "the world was made to be free in" — shaped the entire emotional register of the project. The puzzle design become an invitation to face darkness, as a guided walkthrough toward an unseen, desirable horizon.

The Design Process: From Four Portraits to One Vision

Our initial concept was closer to the format of our Birds & Bees puzzle: four distinct character portraits, each standing independently. Jason developed those four portraits with characteristic precision and care, and they were strong on their own terms.

   

But something wasn't landing for us, and I realized the fault was mine — I hadn't yet fully conceived or conveyed the underlying psychological architecture of the project. When I finally shared that framing with Jason, something clicked. He made the bold decision to abandon the four-panel format and blend the characters into a single unified image. It became a Monster Mashup in the truest sense. Four monsters, one canvas, one coherent psychological terrain.

That shift changed everything about how the puzzle works experientially.

Balancing Polarities

A key design goal from the outset was to balance two distinct emotional registers into the puzzle's piece groupings. One grouping depicts the monster's canonical story — the darkness, the wound, the monstrous acting-out. The other grouping hints at the redemptive arc: what might become possible if the shadow parts were recognized, integrated, and transformed rather than exiled or indulged.

This structure mirrors the Cherokee wolf story. Both wolves are present in the image. The question the puzzle quietly poses — as you handle each piece, as you slowly find where it belongs — is simply: which one are you feeding?

Frankenstein's Monster showcases whimsies that trace his origin (bolts, sutures, surgical instruments) alongside those that hint at a redeemed life of family and community (a teddy bear, a "Best Dad" mug). The Vampire's whimsies move from predatory motifs toward the imagery of radical hospitality and shared abundance. The Headless Horseman's arc runs from wild, decapitated chaos toward stewardship and wholeness. And Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde — the character whose internal war is the most explicit — trades a murderous cane for a paintbrush, a sinister top hat for an artist's beret. The poison becomes the cure. Lead becomes gold.

The Invitation

All four of these characters are, in their respective narratives, portrayed as monsters. That's the point. These dark stories exist as warning calls — maps of what happens when our shadow needs go unrecognized and act out in increasingly destructive ways. Taken to their extremes, the ordinary human hungers for belonging, intimacy, recognition, and justice produce Frankenstein, Dracula, the Horseman, and Hyde.

But the What If? method of storytelling opens another door. What if we read these not as cautionary endpoints but as redemption stories still in progress — stories we might emulate as we move into greater maturity? What if the monsters could recognize, remember, and reintegrate what they had repressed or exiled?

While our past haunts our present, it need not haunt our future. That's the quiet promise of this puzzle. In the poison, you can find the cure. In the darkness, you can still find the light within.

Whimsy List

Hidden Secrets

Ouroboros and Apple

Peter Pumpkinhead with swappable moods

Clue 1: Secret Image

Clue 2: Puzzle Map