``Everybody talks about the Mona Lisa's smile and I thought, well, we've got our own smiling Mona Lisa in our prime minister,'' she said.
Ms Heatherbell's painting, based on the body of da Vinci's La Gioconda (often called Mona Lisa) with Ms Ardern's face, won the Mangaweka Fakes and Forgeries competition at the weekend.
For the competition entrants are asked to create pieces which either directly copy great artists, or are inspired by them.
She entered a competition in the Manawatu-Whanganui region largely as a result of misreading the programme.
``I just had a vague skim, saw the submission date, and thought it was somewhere near Dunedin.''
Ms Heatherbell also realised halfway through the project the submission date was a week later than she originally thought.
``I was still painting it an hour before I gave it to the courier. In the end I just had to stop.
``I was told it got there the day they started judging.''
The Mona Lisa part of the painting was fairly easy as it was straight copying, but she wanted to get Ms Ardern's features just right, she said.
``Yes I am an Ardern fan, so very happy with the election.''
She was happy with the finished product, but ``very surprised'' to win the competition.
Rangitikei's National Party MP Ian McKelvie was on the judging panel which was ``very funny'', she said.
Ms Heatherbell (54) is a trained secondary school art teacher, but said the work was different from most of her paintings which were ``pretty old-fashioned''.
``I've never won an award before, put it that way.''
