Blackout Poetry: Bite-Sized Class

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Elisabeth, and welcome to this super quick bite size class where we are looking at the creative art of Blackout Poetry. I am a professional artist and art educator, as well as a published author illustrator, and I've been teaching classes here on Skillshare since 2021. I love finding fun ways to play with text and art making and Blackout Poetry is a really easy fun approach that combines poetry using found words with art making. You can do any art materials that you want to. You can even work digitally. In this class, I am going to provide you with some texts, but you're also welcome to find your own. I am often going to resell stores and thrift stores to find books that are for sale. Take the pages out, and then I repurpose the cover as a cover for a sketchbook. But then what do you do with the pages on the inside? Lot of times when I'm doing these sketchbooks, I'm leaning into smaller books, so I end up with a lot of pages with words on them. Then those make fantastic collage materials, which is great. I love anything that gets me a new sketchbook, but also provides me with collage materials. But when you're doing it to a book that has text, pages of text. You can then use that text as a foundation for black up poetry. In this class, I'm going to show you how to take found pages of text to seek out the poetry, and find the poetry hidden in the prose, and then we're going to use a variety of art making approaches to black out the words that we don't want to use for our poem. Lot of it depends on both the poet, the artist that's doing the Blackout Poetry, as well as the type of text that you're playing with. You can have a lot of fun with this. It can be a nonsense poem. I could make sense, or you can make this very profound and very meaningful. In the next lesson, I will talk some more about our class project and the materials you're going to want to have on hand for class. I'll see you there. 2. Class Project: The For our class project, we are going to be finding text or using the text that I'm going to share with you in the projects and resources section of class. You could either print out the text onto any kind of paper that you want to for your printer, or you could work digitally as well. Procreate or any other digital software like that would be a fantastic one, then that would let you keep playing and adjusting. If you do this with traditional art making approaches on printed text paper, you have one shot, which I know can be a little intimidating. But this is going to be so fun and we're going to work up our poem and then decide how we want to mask the other words. So if you start with your text and then you seek out your poem, you mark out those words and then through different art making approaches, you make the other words become a design that hides the words and turns that text into more of a texture or a pattern or completely obliterates it and it just becomes gone in the color and the value that you lay down. A quick project that I can come to and do really quickly or I can work on it little by little. It's really fun to do this as a warm up or if you don't have a lot of time for your art making session or to do a collection of them. And see the different ways you can play with variations on masking out the unwanted text, as well as what poems get discovered in the process of this class project. Lesson over to the next lesson, and I'm going to show you the materials that I'm going to have on hand for my class project. I'll see you there. 3. Materials: The materials for our Blackout Poetry project are sheets of text. They can be pages that you take out of an old book, either one that you find at a thrift store, but you can also find different books at your library book sales because I'm often also looking for books that are hardcover that I can take the pages out and then repurpose the hardcover to make an altered book sketchbook. So then what I do is I save my pages for Blackout Poetry and collaging papers. Doesn't really matter what type of book it is. A novel will work better because we do want to have a lot of text filling the page and then we also want to have interesting words to work with. I find that novels give you more to work with than, say, maybe a technical manual, but you could absolutely lean into those too. I've provided you with a couple of different text options on the projects and resources section of our class that you can download and print off for your Blackout now, you can absolutely print on just copy paper if you would like, but if you would like to get a little heavier in your drawing application or painting, you can also print out on any kind of paper that is thin enough to run through your printer. You just have to make sure that you cut it down to 8.5 by 11 so that it will fit and then run it through just like you would a copy paper, then you can paint back into it, draw back into it. The great thing is, even if everybody use the same page of text, every poem would be different because we're all going to be drawn to different words that we find on the page. Then I have a variety of drawing materials that I'm going to like to go back in with fine liner, paint pens. I've got brush pens if I want to play with a transparent element, Paint Pens, sharpies. Those things are going to completely cover the text that's already there or pretty close to it. The brush pens are nice because they leave opacity. That way we get the color, but we also get the text as texture, which is something that's really fun to play. It also use colored pencils, Oil Pastels. If the paper is thick enough or if you mount it on another sheet of paper so that it's more durable, you could work back into this with paint. Again, if you print it, you can choose your paper and then choose your art media from there. Whatever drawing materials you want to work with. And if you want to be a little bit more cautious in creating your poem and crafting it from the words on the page, you could absolutely use a pencil so that you can edit it as you go. But this is all we need for our Blackout Poetry project. Let's head it over to our next lesson and we will begin discovering words as our poem starts to reveal itself to us. I'll see you soon. 4. Finding Your Poem: The the Blackout Poetry, there's a couple of different ways to go about it. So in the traditional sense of Blackout Poetry, the idea is we choose what words to keep, and then we choose what words go away by masking them in a design or completely blacking them out. The original intent of Blackout Poetry was to use a page of text like this one and choose words to keep, and then everything else would get covered in black. So Blackout to find the poetry. I have a whole stack of pages that came out of a book that I have repurposed the cover into a sketchbook, and I'm just going to kind of randomly choose a page. Any page of text will work great. Then there's a couple of different ways we can approach this. We can start to randomly just find a word or a phrase that speaks to us and then build the poem up and down, or you can start at the top and you can work down, or you can start at the bottom and work your way up. For this one, let's just go right into it and just make some quick decisions about what is interesting. Depending on the book and depending on what words you're drawn to, you could come up with a very random silly poem, or you might find something deep. So I'm going to start with on the other side, I'm choosing a phrase. I just jumped out at me, and then I think I'm going to jump around a little bit. Let's start with smells became. I'm just going down the line of text and seeing what sounds like a good part to come next. You can decide how much you include as you're building your poem. Let's see. Smells became marked and spice. Smells became marked in spice where the Riverbank where the riverbank laid. Again, it doesn't have to grammatically make sense. It just has to be something that's interesting to you. Smells became marked in spice where the Riverbank laid, and then we could just jump all the way down to the next part. On the other side, guilty eyes, on the other side, guilty eyes hung dedicated to places on the other half. So I found my poem. For this one, I want to keep this a little faster. I want this to be kind of a quick one. 5. Designing Your Background: Ten Now, we can get a lot more creative with this. We can take the idea of Blackout Poetry to find our poem, and then we can go back in with different drawing details to create a decorative element around the poem. In this one, I did neurographic design. I found my words and I marked around those words or phrases. It doesn't have to just be a single word. Then often as you get started, your poem will bring itself to life, which we'll see in a little bit. Then I did neurographic design around it, and then I filled in all of the black ink for that just like you normally would. And then I played around with different brush pens and a little bit of colored pencil. I really like the brush pens better, so I didn't even get colored pencil out at this point for my next one. But this one is very much about the poem, and then the rest of the words that don't get masked out become texture. And then I kept the neurographic design within the center of the page. But then I really felt like the page blankness was a little distracting. It was like competing with where the words were left. So I just went in with another brush pen and I just did some linear work to create a pattern and a design in the background. So it also kind of creates a nice depth to it. You don't to lean into the poetry element of this. You can lean into words as texture. So for this one, there is a poem, some of this, I did circle bits of words to keep, but it's almost like the poem isn't totally revealing itself. I could work back into this and I could keep going, but I really liked it at this point. So I started the same process. I found my words, and then I started my neurographic design, and then I really liked leaving some of these open. Then I like hiding some of the words even further by doing a spiral design. This is another option, either a pathway that gets you to a color page or this could be where we stop. I really do like the fact that even I forgot that I still had a poem here. That's fun that the poem is found within the page of text, but the poem is also masked by the design that I. And I want to add a design in the background. I think I'm also going to grab a ruler. Now, as we get into the design portion of our page, we can think about do we want to stick black and white? Do we want to have it be more analogous where we have the colors that are next to each other on the color wheel or do we want to go all warm? Do we want to go all cool? Do we want to do contrasting colors? It's really up to you. You can have it match the vibes of your poem or you can just go with colors that you enjoy. So I think what I want to do is I'm going to create a border. I've been very into borders lately. That kind of also gives me a framework to work within as I do my design. But I can also add a design to my border, too. Now I'm going to start doing a design. Anywhere that I get up to a word, I'm going to stop. This part can also just be a chance to dogle. I really don't want you to overthink it. I just want you to have really fun creative session playing with the idea of Blackout Poetry and design. It is possible to accidentally go into your words, and then can either you can just let that accident happen or you can eliminate that word. Maybe that word wasn't meant to be part of your poem. I think I'm just going to kind of lean into the colors that I really enjoy working with. I'm just going to start to fill the broken up space with different design elements. Something that would be super fun and a way to extend this would be to paste a bunch of text pages into a sketchbook or to do a handmade sketchbook with those papers, and then you could do an art exercise or a creative session as a regular creative practice. It was part of a continual process where you get to play and create new poems each day or each week as you feel inspired. Then the more design that I add in the background, the more that my words are popping out, which is great. Great. We can stop there or we can keep going. I want to add some more details. I also think I want to bring my poetry out a little bit more. I think I might just loosely layer up the boxing that I did around the words just to help them stand out a little bit more. I had a couple spots where I went over crossed into where the word is, but that's okay. I'm going to play with my border a little bit more. I'm going to add on to that. Then I'm going to add a design inside that. Great. It's very busy. I'm going to use my brush pens to tone it down a little bit. I'm just going to go over It's going to leave behind the texture of the line work that I did, but it's going to add a background color, which I think is going to help unify the artwork. Brush bats. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave these ones unfilled in. Super easy, super fun, super creative. I love it. I love how this turned out. And I love that. This much more angular linear version brings me just as much joy as the neurographic ones. So if you want something a little bit more involved, I'll add a bonus lesson where I show you the neurographic way to do it just because neurographic drawing takes a little bit more time to get the thing in. So look out for a bonus lesson on Neurographic Blackout Poetry. This is the basics of your design. You take a printed page of text, find the poem. Ing within. Mark out those words and then start filling all the space around your poem with whatever kind of doodles, colors, designs you want. You can do a picture. You can do just abstract. Just have so much fun with this. This should not take a long time to do, but it should be an incredibly fun, relaxing art experience. Lesson over to the last lesson to wrap up the glass. I'll see you later. 6. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in this super quick class about Blackout Poetry. I hope you had so much fun discovering the poetry hidden in your page of text and that you're feeling really inspired about the poem you wrote and the ways that you blacked out the text around it and maybe your play of line and color and pattern and different approaches to the Blackout portion of our class project. Pop in over to the Projects and Resources section of class and upload photos of your poetry to the student gallery. It's really fun to see how everyone approaches a really fun project like this and the art materials you used and the poem you created. There's really no pressure. This is just a super fun, easy, light hearted class to get you creating quickly and having a lot of fun putting together poetry and art. Also really appreciate it if you took time to leave a review, sharing your experience, taking the class with others as they consider joining the Blackout Poetry fun and to give me feedback. I would love to stay connected. If we aren't ready, be sure to click the follow button so you get notified about future classes that I have here on Skillshare. You can also pop over to my profile to see all of the classes that I have. There's quite a large collection these days of different art making approaches and artist inspired series classes to get you creating and creative and inspired in all sorts of variety of ways. Then we can also connect over on Instagram as well as YouTube where I share art making approaches I'm working on things I'm doing in the art studio, art adventures I'm going on. If you love art techniques, I have a ton of videos on my YouTube channel that I think you'll find really fun and inspiring. Thanks again for taking this class and exploring Blackout Poetry and getting some quick art making creative session going nice and fast. I can't wait to see what you've created and I can't wait to see you in another class real soon till next time. 7. Bonus: Neurographic Blackout Poetry: You know you know any and the and and and and and the and and