Tag Archives: Klecksography

October 24: Daring #OctPoWriMo #Writober and #NanoPrep

OctPoWriMo

Read for inspiration and craft

Recommended poem: In the Dark Times by Andres Rojas

Online journal: Diode Poetry

Spotlight Poem from OctPoWriMo Day 23

I Still Believe in Magic by Esther Jones

Poetry prompt Today’s OctPoWriMo prompt is doing something you’ve always wanted to do

Forms Joseph’s Star or LaJemme

Ever since I started playing with klecksography, I intended to draw on my inkblots and put poems on them, but I couldn’t get myself to do it. I even made photocopies of a lot of my inkblots, but still couldn’t get myself to draw on them. So to go along with today’s theme, I grabbed one of my inkblots, drew this happy creature on it and wrote my poem on it. I dared to try a poem form I’ve been wanting to try as well: a grid in which the poem can be read in rows, columns, and/or diagonally.

Writober

For today’s visual prompt, I chose this still from The Double by Richard Ayoade

micro-story : She was tired of running up the stairs only to stare into an empty room. What did she think she would do if she saw the source of the banging, the footsteps? Her nerves were quickly fraying. What could she do?

Read for inspiration and craft

Horror fiction story each thing i show you is a piece of my death by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer
An entertaining epistolary work.

Horror online magazine Apex magazine

NaNo Prep

Today I have a regional prep workshop. I’m excited to see what they have to say and to get to know the participants in my region better.

# NaPoWriMo Day 4: Dreams and Wishes

double ink blot with acrylic paint

Dreamscape (2020)                             acrylic inkblot and photo by Maria L. Berg

I wrote a song called Haunting Dreams that I recorded with Maria and the Aftermath on our album Selective Memories. I uploaded it to HitRecord which is a fun site for artistic collaboration. I think it fits nicely with this theme.

Blogging A to Z

diminuendo – gradually get softer

dolce – play with a sweet tone

dynamics – variations in degree of loudness and softness, shading

NaPoWriMo

Prompt: Write a poem based on an image from a dream

PAD Challenge

Prompt: Write a wish poem

The poem

Dreams and Wishes

Dreams and wishes
echo unfulfilled desires
remnants of reaching
into the vast unknown
only to find a silent ache

Wishes like fishes
swim around in
the collective unconscious
looking for tasty bait
that will hook
and draw them wriggling
to the surface
for a last gasp
only to die

Dreams are the streams
where hope battles
against the current
guided by biological
determination to
fertilize and duplicate
and once spawned
wither and die
decay and wash away

Be diligently weary
of wishes
and find a way
to keep REM sleep at bay
for the promises
dangled by those shimmering
glimpses in the night
are but slimy scales in the light

 

National Poetry Writing Month is Here!

Greet the day with song resized

Blogging A to Z

This year I wanted to do something a little different. I’ll still be exploring great words, but instead of new words I decided to concentrate on specific terminology. Every skill, concentration, study or craft has its own terminology. I thought I would add some music to my poetry by looking at the terminology of music from A to Z.

For my “A” words I’ll start with some words that express tempo (relative rapidity or rate of movement):

adagio – in a leisurely manner, slowly

allegro – brisk or rapid

andante – moderately slow and even, a walking tempo

NaPoWriMo

Prompt: “write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances.”

My action ideas: downhill skiing, water skiing, synchronized swimming, encountering a bear in the wild.

Today’s resource is the Synaesthetic Metaphor Generator. It wasn’t what I expected. Most of the responses I received were neither metaphors nor similes, but after many tries I got a few that I liked:

as lime-green as incandescence
her nerves are ebony lava tubes
my cells are amber nebulae

PAD Challenge

Prompt: a new world

The poem

Shaky Legs

Dragged slowly behind
The push and pull threatens
as I try to control my wobbly knees
and coax my feet with their unwieldy extensions
into position against the current

At my signal
–when I believe I am ready–
I am yanked from buoyancy
only to flail and twist in the cold
losing my legs in every direction
to be slapped hard on the way down

The rope circles back around
I grab for it
Again I fight into the correct coil
then call on the power
to break through the surface tension
and skitter across the waves
all for that one moment of glassy calm
that feels like soaring

 

Klecksography- Today’s poem: Shelter at Home

Shelter at Home

For today’s poem I used the Sasquatch magnetic poetry kit.

This ink blot shows the nice copper iridescent paint in the Golden acrylics I talked about in my Happy Accidents post. Poetry month starts a week from today. Are you getting excited? What are you doing to prepare for your daily poetry challenge?

Happy Reading and Writing!

Innovations in Klecksography: Happy Accidents

mysterious appearance

This poem was made with the Sasquatch magnetic poetry kit. I thought this looked like Mothman. What do you see? If you sit back from the screen you can see the iridescence better.

I was having trouble getting enough color dropped onto the page with my new palette of watercolors, so I thought I would try my new techniques with acrylics. I pulled out an old set of Golden acrylics and I’m glad I did. Those caps were getting hard to take off.

golden acrylics

I tried going back to the eyedropper. Creating the correct consistency is going to take some practice and the flat palette was not conducive to my needs. Luckily, I have a plastic palette with “wells” that I can work with for our next innovations.

Acrylics are definitely more messy. And I might get carpal tunnel from the force of trying to flick blots. I have to use a separate brush for each color and I have to  change out the water often, but it’s the amount of paint in the rinse water that led to a very happy accident.

This set of acrylics has two different iridescent colors: a light greenish white and a copper. I used the white/green in the poem image. At one point in my work, I noticed the rinse-water was a very pretty color and then saw the iridescent shimmer swirl in it. It was so pretty. I pulled out my camera and used the movie function for the first time in years. The music in the background is what I was listening to at the time and the weird (kinda cat sneeze) noise is my camera focusing. You can mute it and listen to whatever you like to enjoy it.

*I am not promoting whatever comes up as “watch next”.

I think it will take a few more days to figure out how to work with the acrylics, but I like these happy accidents and will continue to look for them.

I hope you are finding happy accidents in your endeavors. I would love to hear about them. Please share in the comments.

Here’s to your health!

 

Innovations in Klecksography: Changing the shape of the paper

alluring intrigue grows

For this poem, I used the Mustache magnetic poetry kit.

Today’s innovations were inspired by a design challenge on Spoonflower. Spoonflower is a great website that lets you design your own fabric and start your own fabric store. I have a shop called Mber Creations with a few bokeh photography designs that I turned into repeating patterns for fabric. I really like the samples they sent me of the designs on spandex. I plan to use them in my fabricglass fabric art.

The challenge is to create a fabric design with paper cut outs. The example they gave is based on work by Henri Matisse that he did late in life. His cut-out designs were turned into stained glass (below right). For my innovation, I started by cutting a piece of paper into a similar-ish leaf shape and then splattering it and folding it.

I found I was very timid with the paint when the paper was already cut. Then I pulled out some of my “failures” from yesterday and cut them into Easter Eggs. I like them, after I added more paint. The small one top right opens to be a card. Kinda fun.

Rorschach Easter eggs cut after

The most exciting innovation of the day, in my opinion, was using two folds to blot: vertical and horizontal, clipping on the horizontal after drying and using paper punch shapes.

two fold with paper cutting stamps

I hope you’re finding lots of ways to have fun and stay happy.

 

Innovations in Klecksography: Fail better edition

Butterflies and gator

I like this ink blot from the other day. I see two butterflies and an alligator. What do you see? For this poem I used the Genius magnetic poetry kit.

For today’s innovations in klecksography, I tried a bunch of new things:

I tried folding and blotting along the diagonal

ink blot diagonal fold resized

I tried folding along many diagonals:

ink blots multiple diagonal folds resized

I even tried creating shapes with my splatters:

shapes resized

In the top half, I went for a circle and the bottom was an attempt at a triangle. Can you see it? Neither can I. 🙂

Overall, today’s ideas resulted in ugly messes, in my opinion, but I think with less dots from a larger brush, I might be onto something. At least I have a couple new avenues of exploration. I have heard that innovation comes from failing, trying again and failing better. So here’s to failing better tomorrow!

Happy Reading and Writing!

 

Discovering a New Palette

four ink blots

Sunday morning I was debating whether or not I should order a new little watercolor kit because the one I’ve been using is almost out of paint, but then I remembered an old Gallery art kit in my closet. I was excited to find a whole new palette of colors to play with.

new palette

Gallery separated the palettes into Primary Colors, Earth Tones, and Pastel Shades which makes for nice layers of tones.

The lesson I’ve learned from this discovery is an important lesson even if we weren’t in a pandemic: Look through your supplies before ordering more. You may already have what you need.

The poem

This morning, I took my trash out and went to check my mail. I’m not sure why it surprised me, but kids were playing in the park on the corner and people walked by walking their dogs. Life goes on in my neighborhood. More than normal, I guess, since the kids aren’t in school and people aren’t going to work.

I had to work at it, but I believe I wrote a positive poem for today which was my intention. I used the Sasquatch magnetic poetry kit.

hunt the mysterious at home

Happy Reading and Writing!

Exploring Klecksography is Free and Fun!

You don’t have to have paint and brushes to create ink blots. You can use coffee, tea, even ketchup or mustard. Ran out of printer paper? Any old scrap paper will do.

The legend of alone people

To further my klecksography innovation, I started with the eye-dropper and let that layer dry. Then I tried different size brushes. Flat vs. round brushes didn’t make much difference, but I did notice a difference between the smallish round brush I used yesterday and a large round brush. The results were satisfying, so tomorrow, I’ll keep experimenting with different brushes.

For today’s poem, I used the Sasquatch Magnetic Poetry kit.

April is Poetry month

Here is a list of links to explore as you get ready for National Poetry Month. I’ll be participating in all of these Challenges like I did last year. I like to combine the different prompts and for A to Z I usually explore new words (to me) that I then use in my poems, but I might do something different this year. Any ideas?

National/ Global Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo/ GloPoWriMo)

Academy of American Poets poets.org is a great resource for poetry. They inaugurated National Poetry Month in 1996.

Writer’s Digest Poem a Day (PAD) Challenge

Blogging from A to Z Challenge

The Writer’s Games – Registration opens April 1. Games begin May 8th.

And don’t forget dVerse poets pub where every month is poetry month. It brings together a great community of poets that host prompts and an open link night.

 

Happy Reading and Writing!

Innovations in Klecksography

Ode to man's moist mouth resized

Hi everyone! In preparation for poetry month in only two and a half weeks, I thought I would get in the mood by diving back into the joy of klecksography. If you haven’t read my previous posts on the matter and have no idea what I’m talking about, you might want to take a quick look at my post Gobolinks and Blottentots before reading on.

Like most creative endeavors, setting klecksography aside and coming back to it with fresh eyes led to new ideas. Today’s innovation was dripping the watercolor pain with an eye-dropper instead of a paint brush.

At first I was disappointed. There wasn’t enough color and there was too much water.

After those attempts dried, however, I put more drops of paint on them with a brush and really liked the results. So my ink blots will be a two-part process (until the next innovation): eye-dropper then brush.

I think I set aside klecksography for two reasons:

  1. I couldn’t get myself to draw on my inkblots.
  2. I didn’t want to mix my magnet kits.

Today, neither of those “problems” were an issue. I opened my Mustache Poetry Kit and found all the words I needed and the inkblot already illustrates it perfectly (if I do say so myself) without any drawing on it.

I hope to make these every day for a while. If I do want to draw on them, I’ll make a color copy, or scan them. As for mixing my magnets? I’m not sure yet. I got a bunch of colored whiteboard pens when I was doing this before, thinking I could color code the ones not from the main set and then wipe them off. However, using only the words provided in the kit creates interesting artistic parameters.

What are you doing to get ready for poetry month?

 

Happy Reading and Writing!