Through creating this mosaic I have learned that I am extremely bad at working with small pieces of paper. Originally I planned on using very small squares of paper to recreate the style of opus vermiculatum that it was originally created in. However, this plan fell apart, literally and figuratively, very quickly as I blew on the paper three separate times each resulting in a complete restart. So I settled on sacrificing some historical accuracy in order to keep my sanity along with making it look decent.

After failing multiple times and having many messes of glue and paper I made the controversial decision of not using glue. This proved to be a double-edged sword as on one hand it made rearranging very simple, but also required me to be deathly careful in handling it.

Keeping with the theme of my original plans being shattered, I was going to print a picture of the parrot and simply align the pieces over it. This was ruined when I realized I could not print the picture to be big enough and the color on my printer was not working. So I instead attempted to recreate the mosaic freehand which proved to be quite difficult as I am an inept artist. Despite my lack of artistic skills, I think the outline turned out pretty well and was good enough.

I then began to try to figure out the basic shapes of the drawing such as the ends of the tail which were easy to cut. Working from the outline of the bird inwards made finding usable pieces much simpler.

Accurately displaying some of the colors such as the ones on the box was slightly difficult as I was limited in choices for colored paper. The parrot was probably the easiest part for color matching but the most difficult for arrangement.

The box and shadow were the last two things I did and will be saving the background and floor for the final product’s blog post.