Collages -- looking a bit different these days

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I had been feeling a little stale with my daily collage project -- and maybe I'm allowed/expected to be after 21 months -- so I changed the rules for the fourth quarter of 2014.  And three weeks in I've noticed that indeed my attitude has improved, that my art is looking a bit different and that I like it.

The new rule was that each collage would have to include something that I have drawn, painted, printed or otherwise added with a pencil, pen, brush or other marking implement.

I have been cannibalizing a big sheet of paper that had been monoprinted upon in a recent workshop.  Also after I painted some dowels black I used what was left on the brush to make some messy marks on scrap paper which I have also been using for collage.

old style: narrative -- what's happening here?

For several months I went through a phase of elaborate collages in which the little pasted-on people were doing things.  But magically now that I'm incorporating the painted and monoprinted papers, I seem to have lost some of the narrative impulse.  Instead many of the recent collages have been more abstract and formal, focusing on composition and texture rather than on representation.

Here are a couple of my recent pieces that seem to have a new aesthetic.  I think the new rule will get me through to the end of the project still regarding it as a joy rather than a job.

new style: abstract