Creative Life Series: Cutting and Pasting for Inspiration

Creativity is a subject that has always fascinated me. Over the last few months I've been investing a lot of time in exercising my own creative muscles and learning more about how they work, and whether creativity really is something everyone has access to. So welcome to the first in a new series of posts where I share some of the techniques that work for me, and muse on some of the bigger questions around this subject.

Between blogging and my many creative pursuits, I'm always on the lookout for inspiration. Quite often it floats into my life through little effort on my part, simply through living life, but I'm also a great believer in actively seeking inspiration. One of my favourite ways to do this at the moment is cutting and pasting from magazines.

It's so much fun because I was an expert at this as a kid! A pair of scissors and Kay's catalogue could keep me quiet for hours. 

Lots and lots of very posh, often hardback, publishers' catalgoues turn up at my workplace. No one else has use of them, so... in a snip, home they come with me!

Once I have quite a collection of these and used magazines I make a cup of tea and have a session of leafing through all this paper goodness and cutting out any images that interest me in some way.

And what do I do with them all? 

Sometimes I stick an interesting image to a plain page in my sketchbook and mind map it - anything at all that comes to mind is scribbled down. It's amazing how many ideas emerge that way. A picture really does paint a thousand words.

Other images go on to inspire creative projects such as stationery making - I can scan in an image and print it to make writing paper - or use them to make envelopes, gift tags, etc.

Others go to play in my smash book, or I create moodboards. I love moodboards because they can act like goal-setting to keep me motivated, or simply act as a board of inspiration next time the creative ideas are being sluggish.

All this is made easier by a discerning expert in image selection...

It's great to know I have a go-to pack of images and real-life clipart stashed away. These clippings both inspire creative projects and provide materials for them. I absolutely love Pinterest, but there's also something wonderful about the smell and texture of paper, and the therapeutic snip snip snipping of an afternoon spent sitting on the floor surrounded by beautiful pictures.

Of course, the magazines and catalogues then go on to be recycled!

Do you collect images from magazines, etc.? And if not, what do you do with the magazines you won't read again?