This mosaic was made by a group of 9 year five children, their topic was India and the subjects they chose to draw were peacocks and the Taj Mahal - of the items they listed these seemed to me to be a good combination. I asked each of them to draw 8 pictures of a peacock and 8 pictures of the Taj Mahal, they have only 5 minutes, it stops them putting in too much detail or thinking about it too much!

Someone always chooses an interesting perspective and I loved the way the peacocks tail curved round, most of the other drawings were straight on with the tail raising up behind, so I was glad someone had tried another way, children can be relied on to surprise you! Again architecturally the Taj isn’t quite ‘anatomically correct’, but the simplicity of this drawing leant itself well to translation into a mosaic.

The picture was split into three, using the mesh method, where the picture is made in sections and later assembled on one board. Several worked on the building, some on the peacock and another group on the border and background, after 2 hours the individual pieces of work were beginning to take shape and another hour later we were able to carefully add the mosaiced Taj Mahal (I think building the original took a little longer) and peacock to the background and we were on the home straight. Reluctant to return to their text books (I do love being the fun part of the day) the children started to take more interest in the detail, thus the flowers and arches add some beautiful detail entirely of the children’s creation.

The mosaic has just been grouted and installed!

More community work on THIS PAGE.