By: Brendan Sipes

To create my copy of the parrot mosaic, I used different colored construction paper, scissors, a pencil, and a stick of Elmer’s glue.

After I gathered all of my materials, I printed out a photo of the mosaic as a reference and drew an outline of the parrot onto a white piece of paper.

After I finished drawing the parrot outline, my next step was to start cutting the construction paper into smaller pieces.

Once all of my pieces were cut out and sorted by color, my final step was to start gluing the pieces onto my original drawing.

A very challenging part of completing this mosaic was how difficult the shape of the parrot was. This made both drawing it and gluing down pieces extremely tedious. There were countless times that a certain piece didn’t fit, and I had to reshape or modify it with my scissors. Creating pieces for the parrots two legs and outward feathers were the most difficult because of how small and distinctively shaped they were.

Another challenge I encountered while creating the mosaic was drawing the parrot. I had originally planned on printing out a photo of the mosaic, putting it under the white piece of paper, and easily tracing the outline for my mosaic. However, after I printed out the photo, I realized that the image couldn’t be seen through the white paper and that I would have to improvise and draw the parrot myself. I am not very good at art and drawing, but in the end the outline turned out better than I had expected.

The task took me about two hours to fully complete and between the hiccup in my original plan and the very difficult abstract shape of the parrot, recreating the parrot mosaic was much harder than I originally anticipated.