substrates and ideas

Oftentimes people ask me how I come up with the ideas for my collages. As any artist will attest, that's a complicated question. One of the sources of ideas for me as a collagist are the various sources of raw materials which I peruse (i.e., the texts and photographs and illustrations). I have shared this before with regard to my particular fondness for certain types of source materials (i.e., outer space and black-and-white photography books; see 6-29-2013 post). Here are a couple more I have chosen to start working on. The black-and-white image is from an old magazine (I think "Life") and was particularly of interest to me because it covered more than a single page. As an analog collagist, this allows me to create a bit of a larger piece. I also really like the horizontal orientation (similar to "Two Birds, with One Stoned"). The green and orange substrate also has a horizontal orientation, only because I was lucky enough to come across two of the same issues of Science magazine (i.e., with the same cover art). I will arrange the two covers so it may not be so easy to see that they are identical. Both of these substrates have been "sitting around" my workspace for over a week now. I continually will experiment with images that might "work". This (hopefully) will eventually lead to a composition that I can then elaborate upon and do the finish work on. Sometimes people think I have some kind of picture in my head of what I want a piece to look like; but honestly at this point, I really don't have any idea what the compositions will be. I know that I enjoy the contrast of color with black-and-white (but that's a standard artistic strategy). The third image shown here (the blue topographical image) I think will not be a substrate, but will be cut-out and placed as an "object" on a yet-to-be-determined composition.