How do I make a picture look like a puzzle?

[jcausa]

I would like to know how to take a picture and turn it into a puzzle. I would like to then be able to take a piece of the puzzle out. Please help if you know! I'd appreciate it!

 

[sillysyd]

I know that there's a puzzle "style" that u can apply to an image in photshop, and i would guess u'd use the pen too as a cliping path to trace around one of the pieces and then cut it out and move it. But that's photoshop...i'm not sure about illustrator.

 

[askIllustrator]

If you draw on puzzle piece, place it on top of the image, select both and hit ctrl+7 (mask) it will make a piece for you. This could get costly if you do that for each shape since you would need a copy of the image for every shape. If you want the rest of the puzzle to appear assembled maybe just draw the outline of the pieces and place it ontop of the picture. If you dont need to see through hole the missing piece creates, just put a copy of the shape you made your mask out of, color it the same color as you background and move it to where the hold should be. I'd buy a Mac if I could afford one.

 

[dimoj]

If you want to achieve the puzzle effect using only Illustrator, I would basically do what jAQUAN has suggested, only instead of drawing the pieces myself I would try to find a bitmap image of a jigsaw shape (try a Google image search for 'jigsaw'). Find a line drawing of a jigsaw that just shows the shape of the pieces then place that bitmap into Illustrator. You can now either use the trace tool to create the vector version of the jigsaw outlines or just recreate the puzzle by drawing the same jigsaw shape on a new layer with the pen tool. Create each puzzle piece as a seperate shape and then mask them with your original image as jAQUAN describes (keeping in mind that if your original image is a bitmap it won't have the resizing/rotating etc capabilites that the vector puzzle shape outlines will have).

Depending on what you are using the artwork for though (print or screen) it may be easier to do all this in Photoshop as raster artwork, if you have the software.