I make collages and word posters from vintage and retro illustrations and images in the public domain. Here's my latest piece, 'J is for Journey'.
Had a lot of fun making this one, a lot of good words that begin with J ๐
Beehaw's section for your art and original content, other miscellaneous creative works you've found, and discussion of the creative arts and how they happen generally. Covers everything from digital to physical; photography to painting; abstract to photorealistic; and everything in between.
(It's not mandatory, but we also encourage providing a description of your image(s) for accessibility purposes! See here for a more detailed explanation and advice on how best to do this.)
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This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Reusing clips and maintaining a database sounds really wise for this kind of work. I can recall doing physical collages twice for some classes a few years back. I had a real headache from handling the gluing to finding good clips, and I didn't make an effort to save the rest of the page. I probably lost out on some good stuff there ๐คง.
Doing collages digitally sounds like so much fun to me though, and Eagle sounds like just what the doctor ordered. I tried using XYPlorer, and it's quite a robust improvement on the Windows explorer. The problem is that it seems to get tricky with cloud drive files in my experience. Eagle looks like it has a ton of potential for the kind of stuff I like to do.
The database is priceless, especially because of the ability to tag and filter files.
As I work in both Danish and English, an example of tagging for the Jackrabbit from this poster would be:
Most importantly for my use case, I have a set of special tags denoting which letters a given image can be used for in English or Danish:
So when I need to make the English H poster (which I'm currently working on), I simply search for h-en (starts with H in English), and Eagle gives me all relevant assets. I add these tags manually (as well as stuff like fauna-dk), but because Eagle indexes filenames super well, I've recently taken to just adding most of the basic info to the filenames, like this:
danish-word_english-word__tags-go-here.psd
I save everything as Photoshop PSD files, so if I make an alteration to a file for a specific project, that is saved for all future projects, but the original, unaltered version is still there as a hidden layer if I need it. Simple version control ๐
I also do a lot of analogue collage, and must admit I've yet to find a workable system for storing and sorting my materials; I feel your pain.
I definitely recommend Eagle if you think it fits your use case. Along with Obsidian (for project notes and writing), it is by far the best piece of software I've found in ages ๐