MOC Parrot mosaic

[Redhead1982]

I know I was rather inactive for much too long, but I did spend a lot of my time for different LEGO activities. One of them was this parrot as a mosaic. 

I found a picture of a parrot online and uploaded it to Bricklink's Mosaick tool to generate instructions. Before deciding to build a parrot, I played around with many other options (such as autoportrait, city skylines, various animals), and spend much more time deciding on the motif than final building. The tiles are stuck to a 48x48 baseplate, and the baseplate can be put on the stand I build mostly from Technic bricks. The stand is stable, but wouldn't stand strong wings. Another problem is also the flexibility of the 48x48 baseplate. When I moved the baseplate around the flat (from one room to the other), some of the tiles lifted from the plate slightly.

 

If you're interested, here's a few of the WIP photos showing the progress. Once I got all the extra tiles needed, the building was pretty straightforward.

This was my first mosaic, and I enjoyed designing and building it a lot. I'm interested in trying different motifs, so I'd love to hear from more experienced builders any tips and tricks about a mosaic building.

Edit: Here's the original photo of the parrot (not mine, couldn't find the original source).

[Kristel]

The body of the parrot looks great, but the head doesn't look quite right.  Is it looking towards the viewer and therefore missing a pupil in the eye on the left?

Also, I think the mix of colours (maybe just the reds or oranges?) in the background distract the eye.  I think more muted tones in the background would make the parrot stand out more.

Ps. This comes from zero experience with mosaics, so feel free to ignore!!

[Redhead1982]

9 hours ago, Kristel said:

Ps. This comes from zero experience with mosaics, so feel free to ignore!!

I'm totally ignoring you, Kristel.

Actually, I'm glad you commented on the position of the head. I added the photo I based the mosaic on, so it's a bit easier to see the parrot's posture. One of the problems I had was to decided whether to use plates, tiles or bricks. The color pallette varies between these parts, and I didn't want to splurge out on some rare parts, so I did the compromise on using the tiles, which I had plenty in various colours. That's exactly the point I hoped would be raised by the experienced mosaic builders, to hear how they would go about. I actually spent more time searching for and deciding which photo to actually use, to find a photo with a similar colour scheme to LEGO palette.