By Vasilios Van de Verg

There are a few issues with my original plan.  

The first issue is that a square inch is a lot larger than I originally thought, and my mosaic would have to be massive in order to have any level of detail. I decided to make the paper tiles ½ inch by ½ inch instead. I would also have to find smaller ceramic tiles, which leads into the second issue. The second issue was that there were no white square ceramic tiles smaller than one square inch. I scratched the painting idea entirely and elected to just find tiles that looked like the original mosaic’s background. 

I then removed some of the glass tiles and put three rows of the stone tiles in their place. 

There is now a third issue: The bottom tiles are irregular in size, so it would be very difficult to add in the box that the parrot stands on using tiles. I decided instead to cut it out of paper. I was thinking about making it out of paper tiles, but since the shape I cut out was just a parallelogram, I felt that it would have been unnecessary and tedious. 

I then made the base for the paper tiles by tracing an outline of the bird on black construction paper and cutting it out. 

I then began to make the paper tiles. I made cuts in ½ inch wide strips of green construction paper every ½ an inch, leaving a small bit of paper still connected. I had trouble keeping the cuts clean and uniform, but I decided that it gave the tiles a feathered effect and did nothing to correct it.  

I had a video of me cutting the paper strips but I can’t add videos to WordPress without getting the premium version.

I started attaching the paper tiles in rows along the paper silhouette of the bird. While I was doing this, I got the nagging feeling that maybe I was going about it the wrong way, and that it wasn’t going to be good. It certainly did not look good; the opus-vermiculatum effect only worked when the paper curved one way and when it was bent the other way the paper tiles would overlap each other (in hindsight I could have fixed this by removing the section of each strip that bent this way and flipping them, so they did not overlap). I pushed these thoughts aside and reassured myself that it only looked so bad because it was an unfinished project, and the final version. 

I also cut out a beak and feet for the bird, but I forgot to take a picture before that.

When the parrot was finished I realized I was correct in thinking it was not going well. I considered restarting, but I had already gone through the meticulous process of laying down a strip of paper, waiting for the glue to dry, washing off glue I got on my fingers, going back to add another strip only to realize the glue had not set and messing up the previous strip, and so on. I decided to leave it be, and only added a round cut of black paper for an eye. I then put the pieces together.