#2: Collage-by-Number Template - The Mona Lisa

Let's make a mailable masterpiece!

Welcome to our first template! Each month I’ll give you a how-to for an art project that’s beautiful, yet mailable with a single stamp.

Also, stick around to the end for the link to vote for our first postcard-sized fiction prompt! You’ll vote for one action and one word that I’ll have to infuse into a short story small enough to fit on a postcard available for all subscribers to read. I’m so excited for this part of Snail Mail Sweethearts, especially because I hope that when I post the fiction I write, y’all will make some of your own postcard-sized fiction and share it, too <3

But first…let’s tackle classic art with a modern twist.

Today’s task: The Mona Lisa

My take on La Giocanda.

When I visited the Louvre in 2021, I was struck by so many things: the basement with medieval walls from back when the Louvre wasn’t a staggering museum, but a castle keep; the paintings so high you crane your neck to see them all; and the absolutely unhinged line for The Mona Lisa.

For those of you that have never been, y’all, lemme lay it out: it’s a (beautiful) tiny-ass painting behind a thick wall of glass with a roped-off line for viewing. That shit is like airport security. In this vast and endless building, every room surrounds you on all sides with paintings big enough to span an apartment wall, and yet folks weave through these ropes to witness a painting that’s about 30” x 21” (77 cm x 53 cm).

I went to see the Mona Lisa and all I got was this blurry film photo, 2021.

But hey, it is an icon - and beautiful too. If a painting that small commands a line like that after half a millennium, maybe da Vinci was, I don’t know, onto something.

Even if we won’t paint the next Mona Lisa, our own art should compel us that deep, too. So this week, I started thinking: how hard could it be to collage the Mona Lisa?

Several hours of drawing and erasing and drawing later, I bring you…the Mona Lisa collage-by-number template.