From Burma Shave to Digital Art

The mind works in strange ways, making leaps from one thought to another. That chain can take you to some pretty strange places.

In this case I was watching a movie from the 30's on Turner Classic Movies (I confess to being fond of movies from the 30's). The scene is a car driving along a road in the American southwest. A little while later in the movie one of the characters is getting a shave from his girlfriend. Some hours later thinking back on the movie, Burma Shave popped into my head. I headed for the nearest search engine to see if I could find some of those Burma Shave jingles online. Sure enough, I found plenty – in fact an entire web site devoted to them at burma-shave.org.

The following is the jingle from 1947 that I was reading when I made my creative leap.

No soggy brushes
In your grip
You've always
Got a
Finger tip
Burma Shave

Now how that led me to segue to thinking about making jingles for digital art is a mystery, but I think it was the reference to soggy brushes. Perhaps my previous experience writing computer programs to create lullian poetry (an example on this web site is The Art of Lullian Poetry) had something to do with it. Perhaps it was because of a period of time when I was writing limericks. Anyway I set myself the task of writing some Burma Shave style jingles that reference digital art. In fairly short order I came up with the following spin-off sticking with the soggy brushes opening:

No soggy brushes
To mess your house
Instead just
use your
laser mouse
Digital Art

Firing up Photoshop, I put together the graphic that illustrates this post. While the Burma Shave jingles/poems used one roadside sign per line of prose, that approach just doesn't work well on the Internet so I collapsed everything down to a single image.

You can find an excellent collection of Burma Shave jingles at burma-shave.org and the particular jingle that started me off at No Soggy Brushes – Burma Shave.

And here is one more digital art jingle done in the Burma Shave style.

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2014 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Digital Art, Limericks, Odds and Ends.