Hypocrisy

I’m an avid follower of Austin Kleon’s newspaper blackout poems. I was amazed the first time I read them. I thought the idea was brilliant—extracting words in a news article, and forming what could otherwise be described as poetry.

Because April is the newspaper blackout poetry month, I tried making some poems myself. It’s hard at first, but pretty much like anything else, it takes practice.

This is how I did it:

• Get a newspaper
• Box the words
• Shade the rest of the words (I use Pilot Broad Super Color Marker)
• Scan the newspaper cutout
• Edit in Photoshop: increase contrast to +45 and decrease brightness to –12.

Here, I used a news article from the Philippine Collegian, the official student publication in UP.



Try it out if you have nothing else to do.