Part 1: Backstory

Once upon a time in the way-back days, long before Austin Kleon made blackout poetry a thing, there lived a creative and somewhat annoying child, moi. This clever child was obsessed with all kinds of word play, especially any that involved creative destruction of printed material.

Yes, I was that kid obsessed with rearranging and scribbling, making newspapers, magazines and the occasional textbook difficult for anyone to actually read. But I wasn’t damaging them, I was making them better.

Right?

I still remember a book of horse poems my first grade teacher gave me. One poem stuck with me all these never-mind-how-many-years-ago. It was titled This Little Pony. I have no idea who wrote it so no credit given there.

The original poem:

This little pony

likes to eat

an apple or carrot

because it’s sweet.

The Susie Lobb version, complete with arrows and scribbles switching up the lines:

Because it’s sweet

an apple or carrot

likes to eat

this little pony

I thought it was hysterical. And I’m sure it was amusing the first time I shared it. Get it get it get it??? But by the forth, fifth, sixty-something time friends and family were no longer impressed. The book mysteriously disappeared–imagine that! But it didn’t matter because I had it memorized (and still do!)

Cut me some slack–I was six years old…

Part 2: In the spirit of recycling

Someone gave me one of those 365 day calendar cubes. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I mean, sure–every page had a motivational saying but there were 365 of them. Since I’m a hoarder at heart when it comes to anything remotely resembling art supplies I did the artist thang–set them aside to make art with one day.

Like this:

And this:

I got the urge to make some more today but this time I decided to use my own words from the blog. The post I felt most fitting to use was Paint it Again Sam, simply because of the title.

Here ya go:

All of these were created on the iPad. I imported photos of text into Procreate and went on from there. In this last one, Show Up, I imported several layers of the same photo changing the size which is explains the variation in the text size.

Want to see the series?

The first pieces are live now as prints, tote bags and more in my Fine Art America shop. Check here to explore.

Part 3: Your turn

This week’s creative prompt: Chose a page of text. Any text. Black out everything that doesn’t need to be there. Let the survivors tell a new story.

You can do this old-school with a sharpie and an old book or digitally if you’ve got the tools. No rules except one: you decide what stays.

As always, I’d love to hear what you did with this prompt. Let me know in the comments below.

‘Til next week–