New Gif: The Office Poet (Back)
I'd put aside work on this card over a month ago because I feel it is missing something, an element to go across the bottom somewhere, but it has been sitting for too long, and didn't see a reason to delay releasing it. I can always change and repost. This card is the back of the previous one collage, The Office Poet, so I'll include that one here as well. When looking, consider the two together as "The Office Poet (Front)" and "The Office Poet (Back)".
Back
The Office Poet (Back)
Front
The Office Poet
There aren't a lot of new visual components in this piece. The desk clip art is the same from the previous two collages, and the dash-like symbol across the top is repurposed from the front of "The Office Poet". The cardboard background is again by J. Gardner from theshorways.com.
New are the blue dots which I made in Gimp, and hand drawing at the top came from a Getty collection on archive.org. It's the symbol for the number two, from the "Scoperta della chironomia, ossia, Dell'arte di gestire con le mani” Published in Italy 1797.
The more prominent elements in this piece are the texts. I came up with the character's name independently, and freehand wrote the obituary based off samples from various newspapers across several decades. The poem though, I started composing by using the Poem Generator on thinkzone.wlonk.com and a random phrase generator from watchout4snakes. I looked at a lot of text creation tools, and felt these two offered the most adaptability. By using the preset City theme in the poem generator and plugging word sets from the phrase machine, I got the building blocks for a pretty coherent poem. I had to do some editing, but not as much as you might think, to get the finished piece. At best I'm an amateur poet, and trying to do something in the voice of this fictional character added a second layer to navigate, in the end I'm happy with it.
As for things that held up my release of this, it is more of that inner critic and fear that I'm working through. I have 2 more performances coming up, and a third article for The Atomic Elbow I need to start, along with the work at FLIMSproingfield, so sometimes the productivity here gets deprioritized, but I shouldn't let it fall off my radar entirely.