maketodaycolourful.co.uk

Teletext art is picture-making within the strict limits of the teletext system: a low-resolution, block-based format that once carried news and information to television screens. On Make Today Colourful, each piece is a teletext artwork made for the #WeeklyTeletextArt prompt, and the site pairs every image with a short description. The most reliable way to read a piece is to look at the picture first, then read its description to confirm what the limited shapes and colours are meant to show.

What teletext art actually is

Teletext was an early television information service. Its screen was built from a coarse grid of character cells, so images had to be assembled from blocks, simple graphics shapes, and a small palette of strong colours. That constraint is the medium's signature: flat colour fields, chunky edges, and a slightly pixelated look.

The pieces on Make Today Colourful work inside those rules rather than around them. The site describes them as "Teletext artwork for #WeeklyTeletextArt," and the descriptions repeatedly refer to the format's own vocabulary — "graphics mode," "level 2.5 shapes," and "black and white teletext."

How to read a piece: picture first, description second

Because teletext shapes are abstract, the caption is part of the work. A practical reading order:

1. Scan the whole image for the dominant colour blocks and the overall layout.
2. Find the subject — a house, a watch, a spaceship, an octopus.
3. Read the description to see which details the artist intended, especially small elements that are easy to miss.
4. Re-look at the image with those details in mind.

For example, the "Barbecue" piece shows three terraced houses with roller blinds matching their doors — cyan, white, and magenta — plus birds in a cloudless sky. The people are never visible; the scene is carried by speech: someone in the middle house asks, "Shall we have a barbecue?" while neighbours answer, "Bring the washing in!" and "Let's go to the park!" Without the description, the joke is invisible.

What the pieces on the site look like

The works share a house style but vary in technique:

Two details are worth knowing. First, the "Spaceship" piece is a collaboration: Dan Farrimond drew the ship at Level 1, and the site's author added Level 2.5 elements — a reminder that teletext art has levels of graphical capability, and artists often build on each other's work. Second, "The Mechanical Turk" is described as an animation, so the smile appears as the dummy moves the piece; a still frame will only show part of the effect.

Why the descriptions matter so much

Teletext's resolution is too low for fine detail, so artists rely on suggestion: a few blocks become a suitcase, a row of shapes becomes a terraced street. The site's descriptions act as a key, naming the objects and quoting the text that appears on screen. They also record context a viewer could not guess — that the watch shows the exact time the piece was started, or that the octopus advert is a spoof "not endorsed by Ceefax Holidays."

If you are browsing the archive, read the description before deciding a piece is too abstract; the caption usually resolves it. The site's posts are paginated (Page 1 through Page 13 and beyond), so older pieces are reached through the page navigation at the bottom of the listing.

Getting more out of the collection

• Compare pieces by constraint. The black-and-white "Octopus Suitcase" and the full-colour "Barbecue" show how much changes when the palette shrinks.
• Follow the prompt. Searching #WeeklyTeletextArt will surface work by other artists in the same format, which makes the house style easier to see.
• Treat animations as animations. Where a piece is described as an animation, the movement is part of the joke.
• Use the descriptions as captions, not spoilers. They tell you what the artist meant, which is the point of a format this compressed.

The site presents itself as "Poetry and pictures to brighten your day," and the teletext pieces fit that framing: small, self-contained visual jokes and scenes that reward a second look once you know what you are looking at.

Make Today Colourful is a poetry-and-picture blog best known for its teletext art, and you can browse it in two straightforward ways: scroll the home page to read the newest pieces, or use the pagination links at the bottom of the post list ("Page 1, Page 2 … Page 13, Next page") to work back through the archive. To follow new work, look for the site's subscribe entry point; the site references subscribing but does not publish pricing or account details on the pages reviewed here, so check the subscribe link itself for current terms.

What each post page gives you

Every artwork entry follows the same pattern, which makes the archive easy to scan:

• A title — for example "Barbecue", "Time Machine Watch", "Spaceship", "Octopus Suitcase" or "The Mechanical Turk".
• A short description of the image, including the colours, text and any collaboration credit (the Spaceship piece credits Dan Farrimond for Level 1, with Level 2.5 elements added by the site author).
• A posting date, sometimes two dates where a piece was updated.

The descriptions are unusually detailed for an art blog — the Barbecue entry, for instance, explains the three terraced houses with cyan, white and magenta doors and blinds, the birds, and the overheard lines "Shall we have a barbecue?", "Bring the washing in!" and "Let's go to the park!". If you are reading on a small screen or with images off, the text alone tells you what the piece shows.

Browsing the archive

1. Open the home page. The newest posts appear first, each with its title, description and date.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the list to the posts navigation.
3. Select a page number to jump further back, or "Next page" to move one page at a time. The listing shows 13 pages, so the archive is deep enough to browse in several sittings.
4. On any post, read the description before or after viewing the image — it names the recurring series (#WeeklyTeletextArt) and any collaborators, which helps you spot related pieces.

A practical tip: the pieces are dated across late 2022 and early 2023 (for example 19 November 2022, 21 January 2023, 4 February 2023, 11 February 2023 and 18 July 2023), so if you want to follow the #WeeklyTeletextArt series in order, work backwards from the last page rather than the first.

Following new work

The site includes a subscribe option for updates. Because the reviewed pages do not state a price, a payment method or whether an account is required, treat subscribing as something to confirm on the sign-up page itself rather than assuming it is free or instant. If you would rather not subscribe, the home page is the reliable check — new posts appear at the top with their dates, so a periodic visit shows you anything you have missed.

Deciding how to use the site

The site suits readers who like short, self-contained visual pieces with explanatory text, and who are happy to browse page by page rather than search. If you need a searchable index or artist biographies, this archive does not provide them on the pages reviewed.

Make Today Colourful is a poetry-and-pictures site whose visual work centres on Teletext art — images and animations built from the blocky graphics and limited colour palette of the old broadcast text service. The pieces shown are mostly made for the weekly community prompt #WeeklyTeletextArt, and they range from quiet domestic scenes to object studies and spoof advertising.

The dominant form: Teletext art

Teletext was a text-and-block-graphics system, so its art looks distinctive: chunky shapes, a restricted set of bright colours, and text treated as part of the picture. On this site that constraint is the point rather than a limitation. The works are presented as finished pieces with short descriptions, and several are explicitly labelled as contributions to #WeeklyTeletextArt.

Two formats appear:

• Static images — single-frame scenes and mock adverts.
• Animations — at least one piece is described as an animation, with a character moving across frames.

Subject matter

The subjects are everyday and playful rather than abstract. From the works described on the site:

A few patterns stand out. Domestic and suburban life (houses, neighbours, a barbecue) sits alongside objects (a watch, a suitcase) and pop-culture references (Tetris, the Mechanical Turk). Humour is common, especially in the spoof advert, which mimics the tone of a Ceefax-era commercial and even includes a disclaimer that it is "not endorsed by Ceefax Holidays."

Collaboration and community

Not every piece is solo work. Spaceship is credited as a collaboration with Dan Farrimond: he drew the ship at "Level 1," and the site's author added "Level 2.5" elements. The numbering refers to Teletext's graphics levels, so the collaboration is also a demonstration of how the medium's technical layers can be split between artists.

The #WeeklyTeletextArt tag ties the collection to a recurring shared prompt, which explains why the pieces are varied in subject but consistent in style and format.

What to expect if you visit

The artwork is browsable as a paginated gallery — the index runs to at least 13 pages, with each entry giving a title, a short description of what the image contains, and a posting date. If you are looking for a specific kind of piece, the descriptions are detailed enough to identify it before you open it: they name colours, describe layouts, and quote any text in the image.

The site pairs these pictures with poetry, so the visual work is one half of a broader creative project rather than a standalone art portfolio.

Make Today Colourful (maketodaycolourful.co.uk) is a personal creative site that publishes poetry and pictures “to brighten your day.” Its most visible content is Teletext art — pictures built in the blocky, limited-colour style of old TV text services — posted as short blog entries with a title, a description of the image, and a date. You can browse it as a casual gallery; there is nothing to buy or sign up for on the pages shown.

What you will find on the site

Each post is a single artwork presented as a blog entry. The format is consistent:

• A title — often the name of the object or scene (“Barbecue”, “Time Machine Watch”, “Spaceship”, “Octopus Suitcase”, “The Mechanical Turk”).
• A description — a plain-text explanation of what the image shows, including colours, layout, and any text inside the artwork.
• A date — the posting date, sometimes with an earlier date beneath it.

The descriptions are detailed enough to follow the joke or idea even before you look closely at the image. For example, the “Barbecue” piece describes three terraced houses with roller blinds matching their doors (cyan, white, magenta), birds in a cloudless sky, and neighbours calling out “Shall we have a barbecue?”, “Bring the washing in!”, and “Let’s go to the park!”

The Teletext style

Several pieces are labelled as artwork for #WeeklyTeletextArt, a recurring tag that suggests a shared weekly drawing theme among Teletext artists. The visual rules of the format shape what you see:

“Time Machine Watch” is a good example of the format’s charm: a digital watch reading 6:13:40 — the time the artist started the piece — on a blue background with green, yellow, red, and magenta stripes.

Collaboration and humour

Not every piece is solo. “Spaceship” is credited as a collaboration with Dan Farrimond: Dan drew the spaceship at “Level 1,” and the site’s author added “Level 2.5” elements, with zeroes standing in for smoke. Others are spoofs — “Octopus Suitcase” is a fake black-and-white advert in which trained operatives pack your luggage, offering “ten percent off for Ceefax Holidays customers” and noting “Not endorsed by Ceefax Holidays.”

How to browse it

The site works like a standard blog archive:

1. Open the homepage and read the most recent posts top to bottom.
2. Use the pagination at the bottom (Page 1, Page 2 … Page 13, Next page) to go further back.
3. Open an individual post to see the artwork at full size alongside its description.

There is no search, category filter, or index described on the pages shown, so pagination is the main way to move through the archive. If you want a quick sense of the style, start with “Barbecue” or “Octopus Suitcase” — both rely on a written joke that the description explains.

Who it is for

This is a site to dip into rather than use as a tool. It suits you if you:

• enjoy retro screen graphics and the constraints of Teletext as an art form;
• like short, gentle, observational humour;
• want a few minutes of browsing rather than a reference resource.

It is not a shop, a portfolio with commissions listed, or a tutorial site — at least not on the pages shown. A “subscribe” signal appears in the site data, but no pricing or sign-up details are visible, so treat any subscription option as something to check on the site itself rather than assume.

What to expect from the writing

The descriptions do the interpretive work. They tell you the colours, the objects, the text inside the image, and sometimes the making-of detail (the watch showing the start time; the collaboration split by levels). That makes the site readable even if the images are small or you are unfamiliar with Teletext. The tone is light and self-aware — spoof adverts, neighbourly punchlines, a chess-playing automaton who smiles as he moves a piece.

If you are researching Teletext art as a genre, this site works as one artist’s ongoing sketchbook within it, tied together by the #WeeklyTeletextArt tag and occasional collaborations.