From photo to mosaic

I have been honored to get to know our next door Texas neighbor and brilliant, well-known photographer, Ike Fordyce.  He humbles me by bringing over some of his photographs for me to mosaic.  Here are three:  The Black Winged Stilt, Egret in the Swamp and Gulls on the Rocks.  Gulls on the Rocks was tricky, as I wanted to make sure the gulls looked like they were Standing On the rocks instead of Embedded In the rocks.  I used my saw to cut out layers of the gulls shapes in order to make the mosaic-ed images stand out.   I also started buying rocks, quite a few of them, as I wanted variation.  At one point, our delivery post office carrier drove up and just pointed to the back seat of her car, as it was a Very large box of rocks.  So..,.I have rocks to spare.