Look Closer, And That Mona Lisa’s Made From Thousands Of Doodles

This is a nice recreation of the Mona Lisa, right?

Now look closer:

The drawing is actually a mash-up of thousands of doodles--of giggling dogs and buxom bunnies and amorphous alien creatures--painstakingly rendered to capture the likeness of the Mona Lisa. It’s like a happy marriage of Leonardo da Vinci and James Thurber.

The artist, Tokyo-based Sagaki Keita, has done more than a dozen of these drawings, using pen and ink to refashion classical paintings and sculptures, from a bust of Hermes to Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, into elaborate ecosystems of loopy cartoon characters. A lot of the doodles are improvised, but that doesn’t mean Keita dashes this stuff off overnight. Images like the Mona Lisa, which stretches 2 feet by 1.5 feet (the approximate dimensions of the real thing), take about a month to complete, he tells Co.Design. Larger drawings, like a nearly 13-foot-long rendition of The Last Supper, can take up to 10 months.

Sheesh, that’s dedication. But it’s totally worth it. There’s something perversely satisfying in seeing classical art--art that represents the acme of cultural sophistication--reduced to farm animals and blob people.

[Images courtesy of Sagaki Keita]