Summary: Mosaic puzzles are created in Puzzle Maker Pro by choosing a grid size and a difficulty, picking what the answer will reveal — an abstract pattern the module invents, a shape from the built-in library, or your own artwork — and generating the puzzle with its matching answer key. This guide walks through making your first one, choosing pictures, titling it, and exporting it for print or the web.
Overview
A Mosaic puzzle is a grid of numbers that hides a picture: each number counts the shaded cells in its own 3×3 block, and shading the cells the numbers demand reveals the image. Unlike a nonogram, the clues sit inside the grid rather than along its edges, and every cell — numbered ones included — is the solver’s to decide. And the picture is yours to choose: a shape from the built-in library or your own artwork, not a by-product of the generator.
Puzzle Maker Pro does the hard part. It builds the target picture, computes every cell’s count, then deletes numbers up to the difficulty’s target, keeping only the deletions that leave the board solvable by pure reasoning. What you get is guess-free and has exactly one solution, every time. New to the puzzle itself? Read How Mosaic Puzzles Work first.
Required Modules
Puzzle Maker Pro – Mosaic Puzzles. The editions:
- Mosaic Puzzles (Standard) — makes Mosaic puzzles from the built-in picture library (15 ready-made silhouettes that ship with the module) or from the pictures the module invents for itself, with PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF output of every puzzle and its answer key, and Instant Puzzle Books (a book PDF built from your current settings). It lets you sell the finished books, worksheets and packs you make to your own readers and customers.
- Creative — adds your own pictures: point the module at your image files and the answer becomes your artwork instead of a built-in shape or an abstract pattern. Also adds Puzzle Slides (an interactive PowerPoint for solving live) and Puzzle Book Studio Creative (full layout control over one puzzle set).
- Productivity — adds Time Saver for batch creation, Puzzle Book Studio Productivity (many collections combined into one book), JSON export for the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin, and the right to sell or supply the puzzles you generate to other publishers, businesses and sellers.
- Creative + Interactive and Productivity + Interactive — add the Interactive add-on: online play (HTML output).
Time Saver comes with Productivity, so batch creation is a Productivity feature whether or not you add Interactive. Every edition upgrades to any higher one after purchase, so start with the one that fits what you are making today. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
A free demo is available, so you can try the module before buying.
Preparation
Start Puzzle Maker Pro and open Mosaic Puzzles from the puzzle gallery; the Creator opens on its Main tab. Nothing else is needed to make your first puzzle — the module generates an abstract pattern of its own, and a library of ready-made silhouettes ships with it. Prepare artwork only if you want the answer to be a particular shape of your own (see Choose the Picture below). A 10 × 10 grid on Medium is the default and a good place to start. Puzzle Maker Pro generates every puzzle together with its matching answer key.
Set the Grid Size and Difficulty
Both live on the Main tab.
- Grid width and Grid height — 5 to 40 each (default 10 × 10). The two are set separately, so the grid can be square or not; 40 × 5 and 5 × 40 are both fine. Small boards make quick warm-up pages. The built-in shapes read at 10 × 10; give your own artwork 13 × 13 or more. Above about 30 × 30 the board carries fine detail but needs a trim size larger than 6 × 9 to print legibly.
- Difficulty — Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert (default Medium). This changes one thing: how many numbers are printed. On a 10 × 10 board Easy leaves a number on roughly 70% of the cells, Medium 50%, Hard 35%, and Expert roughly a fifth to a quarter. Every level is still guess-free and still has exactly one solution — an Expert board is not riskier, just barer.
In our tests every size from 5 × 5 to 40 × 40 generated first time, and even a 40 × 40 board takes well under a second — pick the size for the page, not for speed.
Choose the Picture
There are three picture sources, all on the Pictures tab:
- The module’s own generator (default). An abstract pattern — pleasant to solve, but not a picture of anything.
- The built-in library. 15 silhouettes drawn for this purpose — Circle, Heart, Star, Diamond, Cross, Arrow, Crescent, Egg, House, Flower, Fish, Leaf, Cat, Apple and Spade — that read cleanly all the way down to a 10 × 10 board. Available on every edition.
- Your own image files. Any artwork you supply. Creative and up.
Which edition gets what. Every edition can use the built-in library or the module’s own generator; Creative and above can also add your own image files. On Standard the Pictures tab is fully usable — the built-in picker works normally, and only the Add … button for your own files is disabled, under a caption saying what the upgrade buys.
- Build the list. Add built-in … opens a thumbnail picker over the shipped library — pick as many shapes as you want in one go. Add … brings in your own image files (you can also drag them in from Explorer). Mix the two freely; the list does not care where a picture came from. Delete, Clear, Shuffle and the ↑ ↓ buttons manage the order.
- Tick Build the picture from these images. With the box ticked and the list empty, the module’s own generator stays in charge — the toggle only takes effect once there is something in the list.
- Each puzzle takes the next image in the list, cycling back to the top when it runs out — so the list picks which picture, and Quantity (next section) decides how many puzzles.
Tune how the artwork becomes cells
The Image source group on the Main tab controls the sampling:
- Image fit (default Stretch) — how a picture whose proportions differ from the grid is mapped onto it. Stretch uses the whole grid and distorts the picture, Fit keeps the whole picture and letterboxes it with empty margins, Fill crops the edges so the picture covers the grid. Shown on every edition.
- Fill threshold (0 to 1, default 0.5) — each cell samples its patch of the image, and shades when the proportion of dark pixels in that patch crosses this value. Lower it to shade more of the artwork, raise it to shade less. Shown on Creative and up; the built-in shapes are clean silhouettes already and need no tuning.
- Dark pixels fill (default on) — on, the dark areas of the image become the picture. Turn it off for white-on-black artwork, and the light areas fill instead. Transparent pixels are ignored when a cell is sampled, so a PNG with a transparent background behaves like one on white. Shown on Creative and up.
If your artwork cannot be made guess-free at the exact size you asked for, the module may nudge one side by a single cell — 16 × 15 instead of 15 × 15 — to find a board that is; the puzzle’s title shows the size it actually got.
What makes good source artwork: bold, high-contrast silhouettes — a solid shape on a plain background. Remember the whole image is reduced to grid cells — at most 40 × 40, and commonly far fewer — so fine detail, thin lines and text will not survive. Match the image shape to the grid shape where you can, or let Image fit letterbox or crop it; on the default Stretch a portrait image on a wide grid comes out squashed.
Plan the artwork like a print run. Because each puzzle takes the next picture in the list, a themed 50-puzzle book wants roughly 50 pictures — with fewer, the revealed shapes repeat on a cycle. The built-in library’s 15 silhouettes carry a short book on their own, or fill out a longer one alongside your own artwork. Rights to artwork you supply are yours to clear; the built-in shapes ship cleared. Selling the finished books, worksheets and packs you make is covered by every edition, whichever source the pictures came from.
The list stores a reference to each picture rather than a copy — a file path for your own images, a library name for the built-in ones — and resolves it fresh every run. So if you edit one of your images or swap the file, the next generation picks up the change automatically.
If a picture cannot be used, the module says so rather than failing quietly: it reports the reason for that puzzle and carries on with the rest of the run. The usual fixes are to adjust the fill threshold, flip Dark pixels fill, choose a simpler image, try a different grid size, or re-save the file as a plain PNG or JPG if it will not open as an image.
Set the Quantity
Quantity is the box above the tabs: 1 to 999 (previews, and the demo, always make one). It makes several puzzles at the same settings in one run, and boards from the module’s own generator never repeat within a run.
For a book that mixes different sizes and difficulties, use Time Saver (Productivity) rather than quantity — see Generate and Export, below. Each Time Saver row is its own run, so the no-repeat rule applies within a row.
Style It
The Style tab has five controls — Numbers (font), Canvas, Cell fill, Cell border and Filled cell — and Filled cell is the one that matters here: it is the ink of the revealed picture. Those five are everything the Style tab offers for this module — see How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro for how the Style tab works.
The picture ink defaults to a near-black, which is the useful default for print: Mosaic pages drop straight into a black-and-white paperback interior, the cheapest kind to produce. Change Filled cell when you want a coloured picture for a screen edition, a themed book, or a colour interior.
Set the Title
On the Layout tab, choose a Smart Title. The first entry, Custom, is the default: your own title text, used exactly as typed. The rest, for a 10 × 10 Medium board:
- Mosaic Puzzles — e.g. “Mosaic Puzzles”
- Mosaic Puzzles Grid Size — e.g. “Mosaic Puzzles 10 × 10”
- Mosaic Puzzles Difficulty — e.g. “Mosaic Puzzles Medium”
- Mosaic Puzzles Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Mosaic Puzzles 10 × 10 Medium”
- Mosaic — e.g. “Mosaic”
- Mosaic Grid Size — e.g. “Mosaic 10 × 10”
- Mosaic Difficulty — e.g. “Mosaic Medium”
- Mosaic Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Mosaic 10 × 10 Medium”
- Grid Size — e.g. “10 × 10”
- Difficulty — e.g. “Medium”
- Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “10 × 10 Medium”
The same list is available for the puzzle Description, whose default reads: “Shade cells so every number equals how many cells in its 3×3 block (itself included) are shaded; the shaded cells reveal a picture.” Smart Titles works the same way in every module — see the Smart Titles tutorial for the how-to.
Generate and Export
Press Create (in the Create Puzzles panel of the main window). Each puzzle and its answer key appear in the preview and are written to your output folder as separate puzzle and answer-key files; the folder is set under File and Folders → Output Location.
Which file formats get written is set on the main window’s Output Settings tab (Puzzle Output Options → Puzzle Output Format), which is shared by every module.
- Print / PDF — PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF of both the puzzle and the answer key, on every edition. A bitmap is always produced alongside your chosen format, because that is what Puzzle Book Studio places on a page.
- JSON — on Productivity (with or without the Interactive add-on): export your puzzles as JSON for the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin.
- Online play — with Creative + Interactive or Productivity + Interactive, export HTML output for a self-contained playable version where solvers click a cell to shade it, click again to rule it out, and a third time to clear it; see How to Play Puzzles Online.
- Puzzle Slides — an interactive PowerPoint version with a bank of draggable shade tiles, on Creative and up.
- Time Saver — on Productivity (with or without the Interactive add-on), batch-create rows of different sizes and difficulties in one run — the Add Progression button builds a ready-made ramp from smaller/easier to bigger/harder — then assemble the pages into a finished book in Puzzle Book Studio. See How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
Outcome
You can now create Mosaic puzzles end to end: any grid from 5 × 5 to 40 × 40, four difficulty levels, a pattern invented by the module, a shape from the built-in library, or your own artwork, titled, styled, and exported for print, screen or the web — one puzzle, or a whole batch ramped from easy to expert and assembled into a book with Puzzle Book Studio.
FAQ
Which edition do I need to batch-create a whole book?
Productivity — it adds Time Saver, which builds rows of mixed sizes and difficulties in one run, and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity for combining several collections into one book. Creative can lay out a single puzzle set with Puzzle Book Studio Creative; Standard covers Instant Puzzle Books from your current settings.
What sizes can I make?
Anything from 5 × 5 up to 40 × 40. Width and height are set separately, so 40 × 5 and 5 × 40 are both fine — a square is just the case where they match. By default a source image is stretched onto the grid; Image fit changes that to letterbox the whole picture or crop it to fill. Sizes above about 30 × 30 want a larger page than 6 × 9 — a 40 × 40 grid there leaves cells of roughly 3.5 mm.
How many images do I need for a themed book?
Roughly one per puzzle. Each puzzle takes the next picture in the list and the list cycles, so a 50-page book from 10 images repeats each picture five times. The module ships with 15 built-in silhouettes you can use straight away, on any edition, so you need supply your own only when you want shapes the library does not cover.
Which edition do I need to use my own pictures?
Creative or higher — and every edition can use the built-in library. If you open a preset made on a Creative seat, a Standard seat keeps that preset’s built-in pictures and quietly drops the custom ones, falling back to a generated picture if nothing is left, rather than refusing to run.
Can I change the colour of the revealed picture?
Yes — Filled cell on the Style tab is the picture ink. It defaults to a near-black, which is what makes the pages cheap to print in a black-and-white interior, and you can set any colour for a screen edition or a colour book. The canvas, the cell fill and the cell border are on the same tab.
Which edition unlocks online play?
The Interactive add-on — Creative + Interactive or Productivity + Interactive. Puzzle Slides comes with Creative and up, and Time Saver and JSON export come with the Productivity edition itself.