*Sweet Relief

When I was in grad school, one of my art studio teachers gave us an assignment to create a visual journal made up of images we found along our travels through magazines, our own artwork and things like descriptive visual accompaniments you might get when you visit an exhibit and so on. Now this runs a very similar process to collecting pictures for collages and decoupaging and the like, but it's an entire book dedicated to anything that visually appeals to you; and I think that this distinction is exactly what generates more of an ongoing, narrative creative thought process and what might really nail down a more comprehensive expression of this process in the end. Also, it's a crap load of fun.
Here are some shots of a few pages from the different books I put together over the past several years.
I like to mix decor materials with architectural elements, but with no particular rhyme or reason.
And girly and cheesy with nostalgia and guilty pleasures...
And, who the hell knows what, with colors that I thought might have just looked neat with the strips of masking tape holding it all together.

I find these books especially useful when my mind is too overworked or cluttered up and so I just grab the pile of them and sprawl out with my tea next to me and enjoy the little journey all over again. It can't be helped when I see something that sparks a new design in my head. They never fail to work their magic. And all over again, I feel thankful.