Penguin Books

One of my uni projects is about creating a book cover, which is nothing special except the work we produce will then be submitted into a nation wide competition held by Penguin Books.
We have a choice of creating covers for either James and The Giant Peach written by Roald Dahl or A Hundred Years Of Solitude written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I chose Marquez's book to illustrate.
So I started off by researching past book covers. So of them we're okay and were mostly based on the family, Others we're either boring or didn't seem to have much relevance to the story. After reading the book I decided to pick the quote about the birds in cages and setting them free as my starting point.
There are a couple of book covers that use birds in their illustrations:
 I don't really like this cover as I find that I don't really look at the illustration because I'm too busy looking at the colours that have been used.
Delphine Lebourgeois created this cover, I like the different birds that have been used and the composition of them on the page
I don't really like the colours that have been used for this cover as I don't think they work that well.
I love the almost child like drawings of this cover and the bright colours that have been used.
I decided I wanted to use cut out in my illustrations, so after looking at a number of artists I then started cutting out birds and this is what i've come up with so far:

I created these ideas using a scalpel and water colour paints. I will now pick an idea and refine it and figure out what typography will work best with it. 
I really want to spray paint the first cut out parrott onto a t-shirt.