#18: Let's make a copy of René Magritte's The Son of Man

A Collage-by-Number Template for your own Halloween Cards

October! Is there a better month for mail and fiction and visual art? I don’t think so. My mid-2000s mall-goth heart beats a little faster (maybe to the tempo of Oingo Boingo), any butterflies still flapping their wings in my belly give way to the bats already tattooed there (seriously), and the house begins its annual October-to-December-holiday-chaos-decoration-transformation.

Naturally, the only course of action for my newsletter was to go full spooky bones on y’all, too. At the bottom of the page, paid subscribers get to vote for this month’s postcard fiction prompt. Last month y’all picked “tossing a coin into a fountain” and “reef,” and I loved the story I wrote from it. For this round, every single prompt is spooky, so you’ll get a Halloween story delivered to your inbox at the end of the month!

And - did you expect anything less - today’s art template embraces that same Halloween obsession.

Today’s Mailable Art: Collage-by-Number of The Son of Man

While deciding on our patron-only template, I struggled with the curse of too many Halloween-y ideas. Torn between a Lovecraftian cootie catcher (maybe next month) and about seven different classic paintings whose heads I could swap for pumpkins, I hemmed and hawed over the theme.

But thank dog for besties. I hashed out the issue with mine and they had a stroke of genius that blasted my other ideas out of the spooky swamp water:

Giving René Magritte’s painting The Son of Man a Halloween facelift.

Just look at that fruit on his face - ripe for the replacing with a pumpkin, instead!

It was an easy decision after that.

To stay true to Snail Mail Sweethearts and our spirit of analog, I do all my templates by hand - no projectors/software/iPads in sight. This one was strangely harder than the template I made of the Mona dang Lisa. But after a lot of erasing and redrawing, this here relentless gargoyle figured it out - and conjured the most festive card I’ve maybe ever made:

I lucked out with the packaging from a Halloween headband for a perfect base layer.

And now, y’all get to learn to make this spooky postcard too.