Creative Trigger #4: Magazines

This post is the fourth and last in a weekly series on personal creative triggers: places, people or things from which I draw creative or artistic inspiration. To see previous posts click here.

In the first post of this series I admitted to being a documentary junkie; today I admit that my addiction to magazines is a very close second. In the same family as documentaries, magazines stimulate the creative juices in similar ways:

• craft-specific magazines help us keep up with trends and practices related to our craft of choice whether it's writing poetry, macro photography or making art out of recycled bits & pieces;
• artist, writer or photographer profiles serve as inspiration and may even prompt us to study their creative processes and try some of their techniques;
• small business magazines are helpful if we're trying to build our creative practice into a self-sufficient entity;
  
• as with documentaries (see week 1), exposure to new subjects and ideas can trigger even more ideas by combining them with the ones we already have;
• picking up a magazine on a foreign subject can pull us out of a slump by introducing us to a new industry, geographical area or maybe even to a new market for our artwork or writing; and
  
• magazines are an easy and relatively cheap (some art or design-related magazines can get pricey!) way to dip our toes into a new creative world or medium, inviting us to learn and push our creative boundaries.
  

When it comes to magazines that inspire creativity there are some fairly common ones, especially in the world of mixed media:

Somerset Studio
Artful Blogging
Where Women Create
Art Journaling
and mostly anything put out by Stampington & Company

But I like to mix it up a little to get some cross-pollination of ideas going around, here are a few others I've picked up at least once that were fun and inspiring in one way or another:

Architectural Digest
Shambala Sun
Mother Earth News
HOW Design
Success for Women
Nature Photographer
Writer's Digest
Artworks
Cowboys & Indians (OK I admit, Tom Selleck was on the cover)
Mompreneur
PINK
and many many more...

Um, did I mention my addiction?

How about you? Do you have any favourite magazines that either spur you into creativity or help you support it?