Never Judge a Book by its Cover

My process exists in a chaotic mess.
I find that whenever I start a project my favorite point of entry is paper. I open up my (very juvenile) craft supply box and find an starting point that is not intimidating or terribly ambitious off the bat. I like to start on the floor and let myself play around cutting and coloring without worrying about what will come up, but just enjoying the process. I make a mess every time. I started by meditating on the idea of access and some of the denotations I had previously thought up and how to convey that to the cover of a book. As I played with shapes and images I cut some strips that looked like jail bars, so I refined one image to the door of a jail cell. I then recalled the opening scene from Mystery Science Theater 3000, where a vault is unlocked through a series of doors and locks. This scene inspired me to layer some of these concepts together, so I cut and colored until I came up with several "barriers". Once I had the barrier levels I played around with the order, stacking and rearranging and moving them around until they fit together in a visually pleasing way, adding little details with markers until I had a picture that I felt conveyed the idea I was thinking on.
I gave myself a time limit because I can easily get lost in the shreds of paper, and also over-working a concept is a very real danger. It is not a hard time limit but getting into a flow is an easy way to lose hours upon hours, so I try to be reasonable without losing too much sleep. I think I work best when I can put on music and sprawl out and play. I realize my aesthetic with paper is typically very crude, but paper craft and collage is fun and I think my work with kids for so long has trained me to be cartoon-y and accessible, and to genuinely enjoy the process.