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For the second episode of SHOW YOUR WORK! I tried to tell the story of the famous PBS star and painter Bob Ross and his rivalry with his painting teacher, Bill Alexander. (Read the full story here.)

It was hard to find a lot of good information about their relationship — most of this was gleaned from the documentary, Bob Ross: The Happy Painter (which only mentions their beginning, not the falling out), and this 1991 New York Times article, “Bob Ross, the Frugal Gourmet of Painting.”

Alexander Art has a terrific YouTube channel full of videos of Alexander painting.

There were a lot of ways you could go with the story (What happens when a gift becomes a business? Steal Like An Artist, etc.) but I was thinking mostly about what it means to be a mentor and what it means to be a protege.

Here’s a melancholy clip of Alexander that I thought was too sad in the context to use — he talks about how there’s always “new blood” coming in, and it’s okay to “make a buck” from painting, and how when he’s in heaven it will make him proud to see everyone painting:

And here’s a pic of Bill and Bob from the doc:

I like to think they reconciled before Ross’s death in 1995. (Alexander died two years later.) Maybe they’re up in heaven, painting together. Who knows.

Favorite story I had to cut for time/relevance: Bob Ross struggled so much in the early days that he got his famous perm to try save on haircuts. When his business partners made it his logo, he was stuck with it forever, and he always hated it.

Another interesting tidbit: Bob always had a reference painting off camera in the studio to copy off of — what looks like spontaneity was actually very planned. He was a terrific showman and knew how to play into his image. (I also believe he really, really loved to paint and teach.)

Speaking of showmanship, Patton Oswalt has a really funny skit parodying their different styles—Alexander with his lusty German “ZEE MIGHTY BRUSH!” and Ross’s hippy-ish “happy little trees.”

I’m having a lot of fun making these videos — trying to keep the production fast and dirt simple, using only Keynote for the animations, Garageband for recording the sound, and Quicktime Pro to cut it all together. I like the constraint of those primitive tools.

Want to know when a new episode drops? follow me on Twitter or join my mailing list.

I had the pleasure of leading a couple of blackout poetry workshops at the Dallas Museum of Art last weekend. It’s still a huge thrill for me to see a whole room full of people of all ages and backgrounds making art in the same space. I’ve found that folks really don’t need much instruction—they just need materials, some space, some time, and permission to play.

On Saturday, I led an all-teen workshop of 15 students. We worked on poems, and then we went into the galleries to soak up some inspiration. I showed them some pieces I liked and talked about how I look at art in museums and how I look at art in general. One thing I said to them is that it’s one thing to feel something about a piece of art, it’s another thing completely to be able to express it in words. Sometimes you can’t explain why you like a piece, and that’s okay.

I carried an iPad around with me, and as we were looking at the work, I’d pull up a few of my blackout poems to talk about the work in context. At a Mondrian, I talked about color and grids. In sculpture, we talked about subtraction. Etc.

In the Reves collection, which displays the Reves’ collection as it was originally displayed at their villa, I talked about my experiences with 20×200 and collecting art, and how art doesn’t just hang in a museum—it’s something you live with in your everyday life.

Thanks to all the great people at the Dallas Museum of Art for having me. I love teaching, and I love talking about art, so this was a real treat.

See more of the museum’s photos on Flickr ?

I was pretty thrilled when The Austin Museum of Art asked me if I wanted to do a Newspaper Blackout event. We got to display a mini-exhibit of originals and prints, and I led a 90 minute blackout poetry workshop. It was a great time, and we had a terrific turnout.

see it bigger

More photos on my Flickr and AMOA’s Facebook page.

Here’s some video Anne Heller (@annevid) shot of the talk:

Big thanks to AMOA and everyone who showed!

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Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010

View more webinars from Austin Kleon.

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Back in March, my friends Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray and I presented a panel to a packed house at the SXSW Interactive conference here in Austin, Texas. Last week, they posted a podcast of the session without visuals – so I spent some time syncing our slides to the audio.

Watch it above, or see the whole thing here: Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010.

Watch a short YouTube video of my faces exercise:

And learn more about visual note-taking:

• My notes on our 3-hour Vizthink webinar that got this whole thing started
• Visual Thinking for Writers – a talk I gave to our local Vizthink Austin group (see a few slides)
• My sketchbook and drawings from SXSW 2010
• Use the #viznotes tag to see what people posted on Twitter and Flickr

The coolest artifacts from the panel are the amazing Scout Books that Pinball Publishing had printed for us: read all about them.

I squirreled away a couple of them before we ran out — leave a comment below telling me why you want one okay those were making me feel too guilty that I only have four: how about a link to the coolest thing you’ve seen this week and I’ll pick four winners. Contest ends Monday, May 17th. (Be sure to include your e-mail — it won’t be published.)

I can’t think of a nicer way to cap a release day than with a successful release party in your home town bookstore, so thanks a million to BookPeople, to my wife Meg for baking her delicious chocolate chip cookies,  and to the 50+ folks who came out on Tuesday night! Y’all are the best.

See a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr.

I started things off with a short slideshow about how I started making the poems:

And then I went into a little demonstration of how they’re done. Here I am quoting Allen Ginsberg in “A Supermarket In California“:

And here I am explaining how I think of the poems as “Word Find” puzzles we used to do as kids in elementary school:

After that, Bookpeople hooked everybody up with a marker and a newspaper, and we all set about playing:

I was really stunned by how focused everybody was, and by how many people offered to stand up and read their blackout poems for the group. It was truly awesome.  You can read some of the poems over on the Newspaper Blackout Tumblr.

After that, it was time to sign some books:

Again: thank you thank you thank you to everyone who came out! It was such a gas to see y’all with markers and newspapers in hand.

For those of you outside of Austin, we don’t have many national dates planned yet, but I’m hoping that will change, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Thanks to Eric Gomez for this really nice writeup of the event:

What stayed with me most was the fun I had. He was right: it was less like work and more like play, a kind of word search for buried humor, hidden wisdom, or laconic lament. Finding that right note of self expression might take more than a little practice however. Kleon has blacked out hundreds and hundreds of these poems. His experience is telling. I struggled with my article and then he mentioned with the timeliness of an oracle that it’s tough to write one from a political column. He finds that the articles from the “Arts or Sports sections are best.”

Austin Kleon has gained a fan not merely because of his down-to-earth and quietly erudite personality, but because the poems he has “found” buried within newsprint are poetical gems in their own right.

Austin Kleon at PechaKucha Night Austin 07 from PechaKucha Night Austin on Vimeo.

Above is the video for my Newspaper Blackout Pecha Kucha presentation last month in Austin.

What is Pecha Kucha?

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

It was incredibly difficult to time and plan out, and it’s probably the best presentation of my work that I’ve come up with. The audience was really amazing. Thanks to everyone who came, and thanks to Carla and Herman for inviting me.

Here are all my slides in one deck.

And here’s the 20-second time-lapse video that’s in the presentation:

At last week’s VizThink Austin (@VizThinkAustin on Twitter) my friend Sunni Brown asked me to give a variation of my Visual Thinking for Writers talk. Little did I know that Chris Haro of Mighty Pretty Media was going to be there taping, and he was kind enough to allow me to post it all online. I can’t imagine how much time it took him to edit 40 minutes worth of video, so thank you, Chris!

In the first three videos, I talk way too much about my writing background, then get on to good stuff, like how to use index cards to brainstorm ideas, using graphs to understand story structure, and the power of adding captions to pictures.

Thanks to Sunni, Chris, and the amazing group of folks who came out to listen to me chatter on! Here are some iPhone pics I took of them in action:

Y’all rock. I hope that those of you in the Austin area will come to the next Vizthink.

You can watch the videos below or in this Youtube playlist.

On my writing background

On discovering comics, visual thinking, and information design

From writer’s block to Newspaper Blackout

Linear vs. non-linear process

On index cards

On story structure and Kurt Vonnegut’s story charts

The power of captions, and putting pictures and words together

In November I taught my second online course for Vizthink, “Visual Thinking for Writers.”

[ Description  ] [ Buy It ]

It was a catalogue of techniques I’ve discovered over the past couple of years that have helped me with my own writing.

I thought up the course after thinking a lot about the tools writers use, and how young writers are often scoffed at in Q&A sessions when they ask things like “Do you write by hand or on a computer?”

In my experience, it’s not a silly question at all: tools -> process -> writing.

The way you work is important.

My main idea was that the best thing you can do for your writing is step away from the computer, spend $10 in the school supply aisle of your local grocery store, and start making writing with your hands. (See this Wall Street Journal article that asked novelists how they write — well over half of them start with handwritten notes, index cards, etc.) If I was going to teach the workshop in the flesh, I would simply organize it by pens, index cards, post-it notes, scissors, tape, etc.

Here’s a reading list of blog posts I used as inspiration:

• Lay It All Out Where You Can Look At It
• Get Yourself A Calendar
• Mind Maps: Pictures and Words In Space
• Comics Without Pictures
• Writing The Fibonacci Sonnet
• Tools
• How-To Books
• Graph a Story with Mr. Vonnegut
• Maps of Fictional Worlds
• Writing on the Walls

I’ve posted some of my slides below.

UPDATE: Here’s some really nice praise from one of the webinar participants:

Austin Kleon’s webinar was engaging, energetic, and expert. My colleague and I went into the webinar thinking we were getting a $60 presentation. What we got was a learning experience that was intelligent, interesting, fresh, funny — yet grounded in solid research about the ways people think about and respond to their worlds. And it’s *immediately applicable* to both our professional and personal lives! If this is what VizThinkU provides, we’ll be back — a lot.- Denise Dilworth, Content Strategist

Last week Meg and I drove out to San Angelo, Texas. My friend Laurence Musgrove had invited me out to Angelo State to give a talk to a poetry class and conduct a blackout poetry workshop. The idea was to have a kind of “warm up” presentation to get ideas for any book tour I might do. This is the first time I had done anything like this, and how it went far exceeded my expectations. The students were great: they were engaged, eager, and they asked awesome questions. (Laurence posted a great Flickr set of the workshop – the photos in this post are his.)

Below I’ve posted the complete slideshow:

Here I am hating on Microsoft Word:

Here’s how the workshop went:

• I taped newspaper broadsheets to the walls and gave everyone a marker
• We formed a line, and I started by circling one anchor word or phrase
• The next person in line was instructed to build off that anchor phrase
• We kept going until poems emerged

The challenge, as always, was to get the students circling concrete nouns and verbs — words that put images in the head.

This combo made us all chuckle:

We only had a half hour or so, so we didn’t get any finished poems, but I promised everybody I’d go home and see what I could get out of the work we started. I’ll post the results here when I get a chance.

Thanks to Laurence, Angelo State, and all the great students!

I’m hoping we can do more of these workshops after the book comes out.

Over 100 people signed up for Tuesday’s Vizthink “Visual Note-taking 101″ webinar put on by me, Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, and moderated by Dave Gray (with great support from Ryan Coleman and Chris Pascucci…thanks, guys!)

It was a rad way to spend 3 hours: I taught the first section called “But I Can’t Draw!” that tried to get people thinking about drawing as building or collage using a simple alphabet (line, point, circle, square, triangle). We learned to draw stick figures and faces…oh, it was good fun. AND I found out that I really, really love teaching: what could be better than sharing your passion with eager students?

Here are a couple of screengrabs from my session:

UPDATE: Here’s a short version of my “How To Draw Faces” activity:

I drew live in Sketchbook Pro during Mike and Sunni’s presentation, and here are the results:

Mike Rohde’s Sketchnoting presentation

(see it bigger)

Map of Sunni Brown’s, “The Art of Listening” presentation

see it bigger

Here are two thrilling shots of me in action:

And here’s my webinar setup:

Mike has a good recap that pretty much covers everything that went down, including notes from my section and notes from the awesome participants, and Sunni has posted her tips on listening for graphic recording and visual note-taking.

I also highly recommend checking out the notes tagged viznotes on Flickr and all the great Twitter chatter about the event.

(And for fun, go see Rob Court‘s cartoon of my dog Milo, who started whimpering about 2/3 of the way through.)

You can see two little slideshow excerpts from my presentation: “The Battle Between Pictures and Words” and “Anatomy of a Mind Map”

And be sure to check out VizThink!