Blackout Poetry – my new obsession
In the middle of February I was hitting the winter blues something hard (like every year) but it only lasted about a week and then things totally flipped and I felt like I had so much creative energy.
One of my recent creative obsessions is blackout poetry.
If you’ve never heard of blackout poetry it is where you take a page from something (a book, a newspaper, a magazine, etc.) and select a few words to highlight and blackout the rest.
I normally struggle with having to be creative in a box but for some reason this has been working for me. And I have loved the challenge of trying to make something out of the words I am limited to.
I have mostly been pulling pages out of a book that I bought and later found out was missing about 50 pages.
I’ve been using it for other crafty projects for the last while and as of late, lots of blackout poetry.
I have done one attempt at doing this from a newspaper article but I put that page in my art journal, maybe I’ll show some pages from there in the near future.
We only had one black marker in the entire house so I was using it sparingly and not blacking out the whole page, I think it give it an entirely different look and the jury is still out on whether or not I like it.
The book that I have been using has a lot of creepiness to it and I feel like that comes out a lot in the words I have selected but I get excited when I can make my “poem” a happy one.
This has become a bit of a creative exercise for the every day, I like to start my creative time with this because I feel like it gets my brain working in the right way and then I can go on to other creative projects from there.
I have been following Austin Kleon on Instagram recently and looking through a lot of the archives of his website and have felt very creatively inspired by him even though most of his art is very different than the kind that I like to create.
I’ve even been getting the kids involved, Rae has been loving it. Ephraim and I did a collaboration and made the page on the left (below), there we pretty much did the opposite by cutting out words and gluing them onto a black page.
On the right side of the page (below) I finally got some new black markers but underestimated the juiciness so they bled into my words a bit.
That’s one way I’ve been creative lately!
As a result of my rabbit trails of creativity I’ve made some big changes to this website (with more to come) and I am working on streamlining my online life so life is simpler and more intentional.
