Worked On a Dadaist Poetry Postcard Swap Today

I was on the swap-bot.com site looking at what types of swaps are going on there and saw one for a Dadiast poetry postcard swap. I love the Dada movement but had never heard of this poetry.

The technique is to take a newspaper article, as many paragraphs as you want your poems length. Cut up each single word and put them in a bag. Take out one at a time and arrange the words in the order that they come out of the bag.

We were to put these words on a homemade postcard and to decorate the postcard in some way, any way we want.

Last week I cut up cereal boxes and painted the backs with acrylic paints and then cut those into postcard sized pieces.

Today I cut up the newspaper articles and applied the words to the background using acrylic gel medium in soft gloss. I figured out a technique that worked well by the time I struggled with other not useful methods. Here is what I did that worked. I spread some gel medium on the postcard’s surface. I then dabbed my finger with the gel medium and used that tackiness to pick up the tiny word and I adhered it to the postcard. When I was done I lightly put a coating of the soft gloss acrylic gel medium over the whole postcard so that all the edges of the snippets of paper would be adhered well, and left them to dry.

I did three postcards today. One article was about summer camp for special needs children, run by a town. One was about the history of Mickey Mouse and how the original Steamboat Willie was a womanizing, jazz dancing, and alcohol-drinking prankster. The last postcard was about a book that was published showing gorgeous wilderness mountain scenery.

The hand painted backgrounds are pretty or shall I say nice looking. I don’t know if they need any further embellishment or not, I will have to ponder that over the weekend.

If you would like to see some other people’s example of Dadaast postcards, go here.

If you want to check out Swap-bot for yourself, here is that site.

This is the first real mail art that I have ever made and participated in! I don’t consider artist trading cards pure mail art as they, themselves, don’t go through the mail.

Technorati Tags: Dadaist postcard, Dada movement, swap-bot.com, swap bot, mail art.