Blackout poetry is a fun way to manipulate text and create with it. You can do it with markers OR Google Drawings!

Blackout poetry takes standard text (from a newspaper or magazine article … really any text you find). The artist then uses a marker and blacks out all of the words except for a select few, leaving a pithy piece of prose behind.

I was first introduced to blackout poetry by Austin Kleon, author of the books “Steal Like an Artist” and “Show Your Work”.

You can do blackout poetry with Google Drawings, too! It’s a fun way to look at text a little closer, to identify important words, and to remix something into your own creation.

Check out this video for the how-to’s and how it fits into the classroom.

And here’s a link to the original Google Drawings file of the blackout poetry I created on Google Drawings.

(Feel free to go to File > Make a copy if you’d like, but please don’t request that I share the file with you. You can have your own copy this way!)

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