Newspaper Blackout Poetry

Grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news.

This is a 3 star assignment.

Instead of a national newspaper I decided to choose the UMW newspaper The Bullet.  I walked into the academic building Combs and grabbed the first edition of The Bullet that I saw.  It was from September 20, 2012, as shown in image above.  I saw this article on the front page called Study Abroad Provides Choices by Kim Humphries.  The word choices stuck out to me the most and that’s what I decided to base my shot mini poem about.  So I read through the article and found words that would go together that describe the work choices and the process of making choices.  I created this short poem from words in from the newspaper because it is really relating to what I have to do now in my life.  I have to make a lot of decisions (which I’m not very good about) about life and college.  For example I have to make a choice of what I want to major in as well as choosing what I want to do with the rest of my life after college.  I enjoyed doing this assignment because it was something I would not have thought to do.  It just came up when I clicked choose a random one in Visual Assignments.

Here below is a typed out version of my poem I blacked out from The Bullet newspaper:

Choices

Which began,

And ends.

Once in between,

Possibilities,

Encouraged,

Options,

Provide advice.

In the end it will be worth it.

Since I am already up I decided to do one more assignment before I finally went to bed. After I Warhol-ed myself I was ready to play around with Gimp some more. The Splash of Color assignment came up on random shuffle and so I jumped on it. This is one of my favorite photos, one because it represents the beginning of spring and the end of winter, my least favorite season, but also the orange. I LOVE orange, especially the vibrancy of this orange. So I decided to feature it. After Warholing myself this was a piece of cake. I love how it turned out.

What do I do at 1:00 in the morning on a Monday?  Well, I guess Tuesday now.

I warhol myself. ds106 dedication right here. In an attempt to keep up on my work I went to the ds106 visual assignments place and hit random. I came across the assignement Warhol Something. In high school I was on the yearbook committee and so had some experience with photoshop. That being four years ago I vaguely remembered how it worked. Plus, I didn’t even use photoshop. I used Gimp, a more condensed but still very similar version of photoshop. It took me a while to figure out how it worked and re familiarize myself with layers and how to work with a photoshop like program. I used this tutorial to figure out how to use the program, but for the most part it was a lot of trial and error because a lot of commands it talked about I wasn’t sure how to do. After an hour of fiddling, this is my final product. 

Okay so turns out that Venn Pop Diagram I did was a Design Assignment, and so didn’t count towards out Ten Star Goal for this week. As such I did this assignment. Take a look:

Its very important to note that this is Russian Batman from the Superman: Red Son graphic novel (a MUST read). In this imagining, Batman has no know secret identity, is dirt poor, and acts more like the Joker in that he want to destroy Superman’s Russian society. I identify with Russian Batman because I also have little money, and dream of jumping off rooftops, and fighting the system. Unfortunately I don’t get to do those that often, but a man can dream…….

To start off my visual assignments for the week I started out with this on- Splash the Color (also the first of the reccommended assignments listed in the week 5 post):

Color splash is a technique to emphasize details- you remove all color from a photo, and then restore original color to a single object, e.g. a green apple on a table. Think of the Girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List.
You can do this in a number of ways with photo editing software or using mobile apps. The answer lies in the Google .

Splash the Color is a 2 star assignment:

So want to know the story of why I picked this picture?

Ok here it goes: I have this thing in my room that have all the Chinese Zodiac Animals on it.  So what I thought would be cool for this assignment is take a picture of it and then color the Chinese Zodiac animal that represents the year I was born in. And that’s what I did.  I used my iPhone to take and edit the picture.  I first took the picture, and then cropped the picture so only the image of the Chinese Zodiac Animals would appear on it.  Then I used the iPhone app ColorSplash (it’s $0.99 in the app store) that I had on my phone to edit the picture.  With ColorSplash they put the picture in black and white for you and then you can edit the color right in.  It was an easy app to use and it was well worth the $0.99.  I colored in the rooster because that is the animal that represents the year I was born in.