Two personality traits define me more than any other—I am an obsessive compulsive accumulator of anything (books, ephemera, paper but also documents and even email); and I have a chronic inability to follow instructions.

I have vague memories of being good at following instructions at school, but adulthood changed that irrevocably. Now I can’t follow a recipe without feeling the urge of modifying it in some way, for example. Heck, I even change my own recipes, which is why I have long stopped writing them down.

Combine the two together, and it means I have a posse of collage and paper crafts books which I have read religiously—and of which I have never followed a single project.

That is not to say, however, that I don’t get inspired by them. Three books in particular are a constant source of ideas—Claudine Hellmuth’s Collage Discovery Workshop, Traci Bautista’s Collage Unleashed and Corey Moortgat’s The Art of Personal Imagery.

1. My favourite bit of Claudine’s book is her contact paper image transfer technique—and it is the only one I went very close to replicating to the letter, possibly because Claudine herself gives a couple of variations. She suggests trying it with clear tape, which is exactly what I did the first time I tried it. I scanned an old book page, then printed it with my black and white laser printer. I stuck clear tape on it. But instead of burnishing it well, as Claudine recommends, I deliberately left some areas of the tape in looser contact with the paper—the idea was to obtain a more distressed image transfer, where some words showed clearly on the tape and others didn’t. After I ripped the tape (with the relevant bits of the page still attached to it) I followed Claudine’s steps, soaking up the tape in water and peeling off the wet paper. Miraculously, it worked exactly as I wanted it to. Some letters showed clearly, others had only half come through. Hooray!

2. I took a much looser approach in following Traci Bautista’s instructions. I have always admired her loose painting style, so different from my own straight-jacket, ‘I am terrified of making mistakes’ approach. I knew I wanted to try some of that, and set out to repeat her colour scraping technique. Except that the urge to change it gripped me, and I couldn’t resist. So instead of drizzling fluid acrylic paint, I dropped thick impasto-like blobs of dense acrylics on my paper, and scraped them with an old credit card. The verdict? My background was no match to Traci’s, but I liked it well enough to make a few others (with ensuing modifications, of course). They’ll make good collage bases.

3. From Corey Moortgat’s book, I took the idea of staging photoshoots. When I read it first I thought it was pure genius. You see, Corey makes personal art—which means she uses her own images and those of her family in her artwork, just like I do. Only, my pictures are often hideous, where hers always looked so polished. And reading her book I discovered why. Every now and again, she organises photoshoots of herself and her family, taking dozens of artistic pictures with a timeless quality. Like that, she has a stash ready to use when she makes art. It goes without saying that I have never really managed to hold a Corey-style shoot, with neutral clothes, a non-intrusive outdoor setting, and inspiring props. But I have started taking multiple pictures of my family from all sorts of possible angles and, most of all I am indebted to Corey for the suggestion of shooting details—hands, feet, eyes—rather than trying to capture a whole face, or body. Now I am happy to say that my stash, although not of Corey quality, is noticeably better than it was before.

Which goes to prove that accumulating collage books is worth it even though I’ll never manage to follow a project step-by-step.