How to "harvest" magazines for using in collage in your journals

Magazines are plentiful and cheap so they're a great resource for images to collage into your journal. Every photo in a magazine has been through several sets of eyes (photographer, editor, etc) to make sure it's perfectly composed (colour, contrast, light, etc), so why not take advantage of all their hard work to work for you?

Here’s what you’ll need:

• A few magazines you like, but not so much you can't cut them up. The best results come from having a variety, but not too many. 3-5 maximum. 
• Scissors
• A deep box slightly larger than your magazine ~ It’s helpful if the box has a separate lid so you can treat it as two “trays” while you’re working.
• Shallow lidded box that fits inside the deep box ~ I find a chocolate box works well for this. Good excuse to buy yourself some chocolates, too.

Here’s what you do:

• Flip through the magazine with the scissors in your hand and stop at anything that catches your eye. It could appeal to you because of the image, or the colour or the texture or the pattern or the words. Don’t try to figure out “why” you like it. Liking it is enough. 
• Cut out whatever caught your eye, or tear out the whole page if you can’t narrow it down.
• Oddly enough, sometimes less is more because it forces you to be more creative with what you have. Too much to choose from and you'll get bogged down looking for the "perfect" item instead.

Sort as follows:

• Large images and whole pages go into one of the large box trays.
• Small to medium images go into the other large tray.
• Words and letters go into the shallow box. You might like the words because of what they say (great!) or because they’re an interesting font (great!) or because they’re a fun colour (great!). Again, don’t try to figure out “why” you like it. Liking is enough.
• Go through your stack of magazines. Be ruthless but intuitive. When done, put them in the recycling.
• There are plenty of magazines, so only choose images that look interesting to you. I make the most meaningful pages out of things that mean something to me. I don’t have to explain it to anyone (even myself), I just have to like it. The goal is to have a “pool” of images you like that you can work from.
• Eventually, as you use up the images, you’ll need to replenish your image pool, but BEFORE you add more images, have a good purge of what’s still in the box. If you’ve been collaging out of your collection for awhile and you haven’t used an image yet, it might be time to get rid of it. Unless you really like it and have been saving it for a “special place”, but don’t save it for too long! Maybe start a page with it and then see what your intuition wants to add to it.
• I do most of my magazine harvesting while watching (or rather, listening) to TV, the radio or podcasts. It seems that if my ‘word-brain” is preoccupied else-where, it’s easier for my intuition to select images.

Since most of my pages start by choosing a "colour schedme", I also sort images into plastic page protectors by colour. Sometimes, I'll pull out an envelope of a certain colour and create a background using only items from that envelope, or maybe two envelopes that are adjacent to each other on the colour wheel. Here, for example, is a page created using only images I'd harvested from the Green and Blue envelopes, plus some painted and lined papers for writing on later when I work on the page: