It's a viola, not a fiddle!

My dear friend Cindi asked me to make her a collage. She is a fantastic violist and lives with an entire flock of birds (really!). I have heard the most interesting facts about birds from her. I set out to make her a parrot collage, which proved to be the hardest collage I've ever made. I prefer to draw creatures that are round and furry, so I did not know how to draw a cute bird. For reference I used an old sketch I made on a visit to the Oakland zoo. Once I settled on this design, I had to make decisions on what paper to use. I decided to use a watercolor and salt paper I had made a few weeks earlier. I added some marker highlights, to give it a slightly rounder look. The viola was really hard to make, too, because of the perspective and size. For the first time, I cut most of the pieces for the collage so that they fit like a puzzle, instead of layering the paper. If you look at the original really close, you can see that not everything fits perfectly. But it works! The background is color pencil on pastel paper.

(Free print for the first person who can guess what score I used for the background. Hint: it's upside down) - leave a comment with your guess, or just a compliment :0)