Back in my senior year of high school, my teacher assigned us to recreate an art piece of food. When researching, I came across the artist Jason Mecier who famously makes mosaic portraits of celebrities. One of his pieces that I loved was Big Bird holding the U.S.A. flag made of breakfast cereal.

This was made in 2012 after Mitt Romney made a statement about how the government should cut funding to PBS. Jason Mecier commented on this with this piece as well as telling NBCNews “I don’t think cheating our children on education is the right thing to do.”

Whenever Big Bird as a subject comes up, I always think first of how he was meant to be on the Challenger in 1986, instead of the teacher, when it exploded. You see, Big Bird is… big, and to have fit on the ship, they would have had to reconstruct the ship, but they figured that was too much work and scrapped the idea of having Big Bird go to space. Sadly enough, if they had decided to reconstruct the ship, they could have found and fixed the part that caused the explosion. Instead, they didn’t and sent a science teacher in his place, who unfortunately died, among others, in the explosion. It is interesting and weird to think about how Big Bird could have exploded into space with millions of children watching…

Any who, when I decided to recreate this mosaic in paint, I wanted to change the flag. Similar to Mecier’s idea of it being a comment on Mitt Romney’s political statement, I figured I could switch the flag to make a new comment. I would change it to the LGBTQ+ flag as a comment on how children’s shows are being blocked from incorporating LGBTQ+ characters. I find it vital to children’s growth in society to be exposed to diverse people in media to prevent discrimination in the future. The children need to grow to know and understand that there are other people out there that don’t look, love, or act the same as them. It also helps those that are “different” to know that they are seen and that they are valid members of society.

To make this new painting, I made a grid on the original piece and the same grid on my canvas. I then started to mark where all the major lines were so that they were proportionate to the original. I then began to paint. When painting, I wanted to keep most of the natural shape of the cereal. So, little by little, I put it all together and got this.

I thank you for listening to my ramblings and I hope you have an amazing day 🙂 <3.