One of the first things I tackled when preparing for my up-coming cross-country move was to go through my stacks of magazines, mining prospective images for collage. I ended up with hundreds of bits and pieces and sorted and stored them: images, backgrounds, florals, text, color and texture warm, color and texture cool, and color and texture neutral. It felt good to be able to toss the magazines, but have the best parts saved and cataloged (sort of) to use later.
As I waded through all those magazines, the image that most appealed to me was an orchard of crabapple trees, edited to a lovely muted pink tone. As soon as I found it, I set it aside and as I continued through the magazines, added other bits I found that I thought were particularly nice with the pink crabapple trees.
When I was done with my magazine mining, I returned my attention to this little stack and spent happy times arranging and rearranging them. Finally, I found the arrangement I liked best and snapped this photo.
Good think that I did, because when I used them in a collage I didn't like the result at all! I had managed to completely annihilate the beauty of those original images. One of the common traps in collage work is to get too attached to a particular part, not want to cover it up in any way, and being blocked from continuing. Well, that wasn't my problem in this instance. I covered my beauties up with so many layers of stuff that I ruined them. You notice I'm not posting a pic of the result. I just want to remember these original lovelies.