..Miss Brightside..

When never-ending exam timetables and full-time work starts to descend upon your life, it’s no surprise that creative hobbies like drawing and painting become the least of your worries. After coming in from work at about 7pm every day, all I often feel like doing is having dinner, watching TV and falling asleep! It seems like me, and others I know, are living for the weekend. The worst of it is, by Friday night we have too heavy a night and then the weekend becomes a write-off for any brain stimulating activity.

So how can you ensure you don’t lose that same zest for creativity that we all experienced during childhood? I remember a well-known phrase saying that we’re all born artists… the problem lies in learning how to become one again as an adult! I have every respect for those people who somehow make time for painting, writing stories and music. I suspect part of the problem with me lies in the fact that I worry my output won’t be good anyway, so what’s the point?!

Anyway, here a few inspirational articles to motivate those of us who know we should be doing something productive with our free-time….

Although I’m in no position to give advice on this seeing as I’m particularly bad at putting words into actions, here are a few *inspirational* ideas:

+ Wake up half an hour earlier than necessary and write whatever comes into your head – noting down your dreams, doodling whatever comes into mind.

+ Use the titles and songwords of your favourite songs to inspire you to write a mini-story or drawing. (I might publish some of my own attempts at this some time soon!)

+ Think of a film that particularly disappointed you and rewrite its synopsis (or even a whole scene) with a better outcome entirely of your own doing!

+ Use people you know, such as work colleagues or friends, and think of all their eccentricities that make them who they are. From there you could either be inspired to create your own fictional character.

+ With the risk of coming across as stingy, start making presents for people, or at least personalising ones you’ve bought, to make them that extra bit special. I always thought a great idea would be to personalise a t-shirt or the cover of a journal – you could use print transfers of photos, stencil names or in-jokes between you and the recipient; there’s so many ways you can make a generic gift extra special really.

+ In a similar vein to the point above, you can kill two birds with one stone by getting creative out of necessity. If you’re on a budget, how about designing and making your own clothes? That way, even if you’re tempted to sit about as a coach potato, you can knit to your heart’s content at the same time.

+ Use up those dead minutes when commuting or in a waiting room with one of the most trustworthy companions you can find; a plain leafed A5/A6 handbook. As well as being portable, it’s ideal for 5-minute sketches or jotting down random thoughts/ideas as they come to you.

Want to be a famous hipster in this day and age? No worries, all you need is a famous mother/father/sister/brother/boyfriend!! it seems that these days there’s a fast-track to notoriety and adulation in the tabloids and glossy magazines. Countless young starlets who grace the covers of Nylon, Dazed & Confused and gossip columns of tabloid papers all seem to have one thing in common; their time in the spotlight comes courtesy of their parent’s or siblings hard work!

This trend caught my attention when it reared its ugly head most notably with Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton’s propulsion to stardom, for being, you guessed it, famous as a result of their family name. Trading on their surname secured them their own TV series, an entertaining stage upon which Nicole and Paris were able to showcase how being a Hilton or a Ritchie entitles you to get away with murder!

The backlash Peaches Geldof has received in response to her debut column in Nylon Magazine brings up a few good points. Firstly, why are we so quick to worship people who have not had to work hard for the opportunities given to them? While Peaches may have had to grow up in the limelight because of her dad Bob Geldof’s and mum Paula Hutchence’s fame, does this mean she is owed a career in the media as a result?

Many responses to the column argue that there are so many more deserving journalists who could make real use of writing for a high-profile magazine. Peaches herself uses her column to make a few depth-less observations about her new life in New York, a place she assured us there’s “always something exciting to do”, ranging from buying pizza from street vendors to uhh… doing more shopping.

Then again, what were the readers of her column expecting? She is 19-years-old whose shopping, partying and love life are the main topics of interest in magazines such as Heat.

Positioning people like Peaches as a celebrity says a lot more about us, the consumers, than her. She is merely taking advantage of the public’s ever-growing need for the same old drivel. It may not be thought-provoking or memorable, but we still lap it up as though it were! Judging by the comments on her column, it seems celebrities who are famous for nothing aren’t as loved and adored as they may think. Rather, they conveniently satisfy our hunger for magazine columns and editorials in the same sense that fast food satisfies our desire for cheap convenience.

I think we are all guilty of over-indulging in the meaningless dross Peaches’ column exemplifies, precisely because it doesn’t challenge you, and is easy to consume. I just hope that celebrities like her, who are essentially famous for doing f’all, try to use their status and position for a more useful purpose.

Alesha Dixon of Mis-Teeq fame’s documentary about the perils of retouching in the media and its influence on contemporary perceptions of beauty aired as part of BBC3’s Beauty Season this Monday. Her persistence in investigating the increasingly narrow ‘acceptable’ norms of ideal female beauty highlighted just how artificial the images we see every day the media are. Declaring it as her ‘mission’ to convince a glossy magazine to put her on the cover without a single Photoshop trick, I couldn’t help thinking that discussion of female beauty needs a ruthless debate that exceeds Alesha’s focus on the industry’s airbrushing of pimples and skimming of thighs and bingo arms. Take a look at most television shows and magazines and you will see a wave of identikit female presenters and models who are often hard to distinguish between.

How many TV shows aimed at young women can you think of that are hosted by women size12+ and that challenge conventional norms of beauty? The females in the public eye that appear to excel in their careers are mostly blonde-haired, waif-like and do very little to represent more than 5% of the female population… While documentaries such as Look But Don’t Touch should be commended in their exploration of representations of female beauty, there are several points about the show that reveal the British audience are once again crying out for a show that truly delves into this issue. Cheryl Cole, the stick-thin Girls Aloud member (who, it must be mentioned, seems to have gained an exponential amount of tabloid inches in proportion to the number of inches her waist shrinks to) was interviewed by Alesha about the unrealistic expectations that the media places on young girls. Stuart Jeffries, on the Guardian’s TV & Radio Blog, remarked that:

Yesterday, incidentally, Cole topped a poll by a slimming-aid firm to find Britain’s “ultimate fantasy body”.

Surely I’m not alone in finding the documentary rather hypocritical in choosing the very stunning Cheryl to voice her concerns over the perils of airbrushing in adverts?! Firstly, the camera quite clearly captures Cheryl as a flawless beauty whose tiny frame quite evidently fails to represent an average teenage woman’s body?

Time and time again it appears that the majority of men surveyed in various questionnaires about the ideal woman favour curvier women over the boyish frames of supermodels and the like. It is interesting then that women nevertheless feel that to be attractive and sexy they must undergo a never-ending battle to lose weight and tone themselves to perfection… I am not damning skinny women seeing as I myself am a size 8, but it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that the real reason women such as Victoria Beckham are (seemingly) adored by young females is because of the power that becoming skinny has endowed upon such public figures. When in the Spice Girls Victoria Beckham was arguably never the centre of attention, but the second she bagged a famous footballer and her body started to shrink she was worshipped by the tabloids.

Can our society’s ideals of female beauty ever shift back to some degree of normality? Liz Jones, ex-editor of a glossy fashion magazine, ended up having to leave her job because of her attempt to inject some normality into magazine covers again.

When did you last see someone bright on the cover of a magazine? When did you last see Zadie Smith on a magazine? [...] They’re all vacuous and vacant.

If the publishing companies in charge of women’s magazines are so desperate to maintain high sales figures, why are they continually attempting to sell a product which on the whole results in lowering the inner happiness and satisfaction of its impressionable young female readers? It intrigues me to think that those in charge won’t attempt to market a product that holistically promotes well-being in its readers and embraces the reality of women’s bodies. Sadly, maybe it’s because most young women truly buy into the idea that the answer to a successful life (both professionally and privately) lies in trying to fit into a very narrow set of parameters of beauty.