When picking out my subject for today’s little painting I was a little surprised to find that nearly all my lipsticks are almost identical in shade! Its not even as if I wear lipstick that much – it never stays on, I put it on and then a few minutes later it seems like its gone. I read somewhere that someone had figured out that over the average woman’s lifetime she will eat over 6lbs of lipstick. If each lipstick weighs at most 2 ounces that is 48 lipsticks! And for all those millions of women in the thirld world who have never even seen one, that means that some women must be living entirely off lipstick!

I was thinking more about sketchbooks this morning and was reminded of the journals we had to make in art school. Quite a high percentage of our final grade was on our journals as they were supposed to show not only our process in exploring concepts but our research into other artists, our philosophy and conclusions we had come to. There was a guy called Gary, on my foundation course (wonder whatever happened to him!) who was a sculptor – produced an amazing final piece at the end of the year with multiple steel oscar type figures holding up a square stone block on their heads. His journals were as beautiful as his artwork. He wrote everything on a typewriter using something like tracing paper and then tore out the words of the main sheet and stuck them in his journal over the drawings. And then there was Debbie (she went on to do a year designing fabrics for DKNY) who did wonderful fabric designs and her sketchbook was filled with the most amazing stuff. A good journal was judged by how fat it was – you were supposed to stick flyers from all the exhibitions you went to see (seeing other contemporary artists work was considered extremely important), pages of magazines, little sketches you had done on other papers, bits of anything and everything (leaves, pressed flowers, fabrics, paint charts, etc etc). These were definitely all working journals though rather than decorative pieces. Though they seemed like very hard work at the time, now I think that there were many benfits to this kind of working journal.