Austin Kleon

PUTTING THINGS INTO BOXES

My sketchbooks ebb and flow. Whenever I’m working non-stop on a project, my sketchbook suffers. Whenever I’m meandering, reading a lot, wondering what to do next, my sketchbook flourishes. Is there a correlation to my mental health? Almost certainly. Were food and shelter provided for me, I could be content to spend the rest of my days reading and doodling in a sketchbook, finished product be damned.

This afternoon I read Ivan Brunetti‘s interview in Todd Hignite’s IN THE STUDIO. He was talking a lot about grids, and how if you put objects into a grid, they read as a system, or “pleasing geometry,” and viewers automatically start to structure them and find relationships between them. He pointed to this Kandinsky print as an inspiration:

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He also related this “putting things into boxes” as part of his definition of cartooning:

The nature of cartooning seems inherently playful, having its roots in a playful kind of drawing, but because you’re putting things into boxes and organizing pages into panels and shapes of rectangles and circles, it automatically has an architectural quality, too.

I was talking to Dan Chaon a while back and he told me he uses an exercise with his students where he has them divide a piece of notebook paper into six “panels” and then instructs them to write scenes in each box. I really like this idea of looking at writing as merely a filling of black space. Lately, I’ve been playing with grids in my sketchbook pages:

(I’ve also been copying people’s work: the last five panels are ripped from the amazing Tom Gauld.)

I find that gridding gives way to lots of spontaneous doodling and gaglines…

I’ve also been trying to rip off Lynda Barry and treat my writing as calligraphically as possible–varying text sizes and styles within the same space. Brunetti had a great point in the interview when he said that cartooning wasn’t necessarily drawing, it was more like calligraphy or writing…writing with pictures, as Saul Steinberg would say.

Speaking of putting things into boxes, I can’t really keep a sketchbook at my desk at work, but we have all kinds of post-it notes around, so if there’s a bit of downtime and a flash of inspiration, I’ve been using the post-it as a panel, and doing a quick doodle. Jessica Hagy’s wonderful index cards have already captured the cartoon-on-mundane-office-supply market…but Meg thought these were pretty funny:

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NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS IN TORONTO’S NATIONAL POST

NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS IN TORONTO'S NATIONAL POST

I was really surprised (but pleased!) when Samantha Grice called me last week and said that the National Post in Toronto was interested in running a few newspaper blackout poems in the “Avenue” section of Arts and Life. The National Post is a fairly conservative newspaper, but they’ve won several awards for their layout and graphic design. The article ran yesterday, and here’s what Samantha wrote up:

How to find poems buried in the headlines of this newspaper using only a Sharpie and your wits

BY SAMANTHA GRICE

National Post

The financial pages make the worst poems.

“No offense to business writers, but in one article the same word will repeat itself over and over,” explains Austin Kleon, a writer and comic artist from Cleveland who started making blackout poems a year ago. “I did a poem recently where the word was acquisition and it was repeated several times.”

Kleon prefers the city or arts sections for optimum poetic artistry. His newspaper of choice is The New York Times for no other reason than his wife has a subscription to the Gray Lady and big stacks often pile up in their apartment. Kleon figured he should do something artsy with them.

“I really like Sharpies and I was playing with a Sharpie one day and it just happened,” he explains. “I wish I had a better story.”

For a while Kleon was doing a daily poem, but one day he stopped and didn’t do another for almost a year. When several blogs recently lauded their genius, Kleon picked up his Sharpie again. “The problem is they are fairly time-intensive, believe it or not,” he says of the poems. “They take anywhere from a half-hour to an hour and for what you get, it seems like a long time.”

Fans of the poems have told Kleon they are thrilled with what they have got from his efforts. “They say, ‘Omigod, I love them. I’m going to go home and try one right away,'” he says. “And I think as an artist that’s one of the coolest things you can hear. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

The DIY factor does make blackout poems attractive as an interactive pastime. One can imagine taking up blackout poetry on their daily bus commute in place of sudoku or the crossword puzzle. Kleon says they are incredibly fun to do. “I come from a creative writing background in college and nothing takes the fun out of writing like taking a class on writing,” he says. “These are a joy to do.”

But not perhaps as easy to do as one might think. “My wife said to me, ‘You weren’t home the other night and I tried to do one and I couldn’t do it. I don’t know how you do one every day.’ I told her it’s a lot of sitting around and running your hand through your hair.”

Omigod! Haha.

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