By the Book: Found Poetry

I had the great opportunity yesterday to take a class that's been on my bucket list for a while!  By the Book: Found Poetry was taught by Jessica Davies of Salted Pink Studio in Maryland.

In this technique, you begin with a page of text from a printed book, then selectively highlight individual words within the page to create a new poem hidden within the original prose.  After tangling around the words and adding color, the finished results are captivating!

I quickly finished my first found poem and immediately started on a second.  As Jessica said, "Welcome to the rabbit hole!"  I'm hoping to hit up a second hand shop this week for more book pages to work with.

This technique can be drawn directly on the original book pages, but I chose to cut 5x8 "tiles" from large sheets of Legion Stonehenge paper (purchased from Dick Blick) and printed the scanned images by passing the cut paper through my laser printer's manual feed.  Worked like a charm, and it was so nice to be working on proper art paper!

Using the cotton paper also made it possible for me to use watercolor inks to tint the background (water color would not be recommended when working on regular book paper).  In the green\blue tinted image, I used Sakura Koi Coloring Brush Pens, and in the purple tinted image, I used Dr. Ph. Martin Concentrated Water Color. 

Jessica did a really nice job of walking through the composition process but this was not a class teaching specific tangles.  I'd recommend it for those who already have a basic personal library of go-to tangles to drawn from.

I will likely add this class to my repertoire once I've built up a student body with the requisite experience level but in the meantime, if you're interested in giving this a try, check out Jessica's class list to see if she is offering it again on any upcoming dates. 

Click each image below for a closer look and to read my "found poems"!