My Improvements in Art

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Welcome to another post! I was thinking of my last post this morning, which led me to think about the other forms of art I’ve made. I wanted to share something I wrote on my About Me page, which is one of my new hobbies: painting. Starting last summer, I tried painting on canvases, hoping to fill my time with something interesting. My first painting was a success, although I have improved greatly from that point. Below, I will show each one and go into a little bit of detail on it.

This is the first canvas painting I ever did, which was in May of last year. It is supposed to show a late evening sky with trees in the front. The style of trees has changed for me, as you will see later on. The paint also stops at the edge of the canvas instead of going all the way around the sides of it, which is not very visible in this photo. I think I have improved upon this painting very much.

The second painting I made was around September or October of last year. It was inspired by a painting by Serena Art, which I watched on YouTube one day. This one is my favorite because it feels more creative and artistic to me. In order to create the girl that points upward, I drew a stencil in thick paper and cut it out, then traced over that with a pencil onto the canvas. I filled it in with black paint and made a small patch of sky to go with it, and voilà!

This one was an interesting attempt at a Bob Ross tutorial of a cabin. It was meant to be a gift to my mom for Christmas, but I messed up halfway through and decided to give her the next painting instead. I made the ground of the original tutorial look too blue, so I decided to make it an icy lake instead. I’d never tried painting water before, so I smeared some grey on the canvas and called it a reflection. I’d say it’s alright for a first try at making water.

My family and I decided to call this Cotton Candy Mountain for a reason. As my most recent and most chaotic creation, it hangs in our pantry proudly. It was inspired by another YouTube video by Grace J Art. I went a bit overboard with the snow on the mountain, but we still love this painting dearly at my house.

If you think painting sounds like a fun thing to do, I strongly suggest trying it. It’s been really cool to see what I end up creating, especially when I have a guide and veer from the instructions. I hope to show you more of these as I improve my skills later on!

*All photos in this post were taken by me

An Artful Snow Day☃️

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This morning, I had planned to make a snowman, which is one of my favorite snow day activities. I went outside later, ready to build one, only to find that the temperature was too low for the snow to stick together and form snowballs. To combat this problem, I decided to try something new and make “snow art”.

I gathered containers of water and dropped food coloring into each one. I took them outside, creating my abstract masterpiece by spraying and pouring the water over the snow. I ran into some issues with the size of my bottles and food coloring that was not strong enough to see in the snow. As a solution, I exchanged spray bottles back and forth between my house and outside. I let my dad fill the bottles up, then I took them back outside to spray so I would not get snow inside the house. When the food coloring in my bottles was not adequate enough to see, I simply asked my dad to put more color in them.

Therefore, when the problem of powdery snow arose, I decided to try snow art. When my bottles of water ran into challenges, I asked my dad to help me and solved my second issue. I was glad to get outside and try something different today!

 

*The image in this post was taken by me

Series Review – The Time Quintet

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As you may have read in my previous post, I have read the book A Wrinkle in Time in the past. It is one of my favorite books, although many people believe it is hard to get into. Not only did I read this book, but I read the whole series as well, the Time Quintet. It consists of five books: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in The Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time.

Some characters I will refer to are Meg, Sandy, Dennys, and Charles Wallace, the four Murry siblings. I will also mention Meg’s daughter Polly, who appears in the last book, and Meg’s friend Calvin, who is an important character in the series.

Let’s read what I have to say about these five books!

A Wrinkle in Time

This was the first book to be released in the quintet, and it won the 1963 Newbery Medal. Out of all the books, this is my favorite. I love the way it was written, the theme of the story, and the odd and interesting characters. Most of the other books did not have characters like the strange people you can see on the side of the book shown above. They made the story fun to read. The concepts that were talked about in this book were strange, but nothing your mind does not have to work too hard to imagine.

A Wind in the Door

This book receives fourth place in my ranking. It is not my least favorite, but it was written in a way that I could not comprehend well and it seemed to get in the way of what I was reading. It is about Meg’s brother Charles Wallace, who got severe disease, and Meg gets some people to help her try to fix it. The concepts that were talked about in this book were even stranger than in the first book. The characters were not fun or interesting to read about, in my opinion. The ending was rather uneventful and didn’t add up to what I expected it to be.

This receives last place on my ranking. I would describe it as cloudy or fuzzy because I still do not remember much of the book. For me, it was extremely hard to get into. It mostly dives into the history of how Calvin (an important character in the series) and his family came to be. I liked the information this book gave me, but nothing too significant happened.

Many Waters

This is my second-favorite book in the series. It is about Meg Murry’s brothers, Sandy and Dennys, who are taken back to biblical times and have to try to find a way out. One of the things I like in a book is a set of characters who interest me, and this story hit the spot. It was fun to read, with more action and plot twists than most of the other books in the quintet. It was unlike anything I had ever read before.

An Acceptable Time

This book will receive third place on my list. I think it was good, but I did not enjoy it as much as Many Waters and A Wrinkle in Time. It is about Polly, an old friend of Polly’s, and a bishop that stumble into a time 3,000 years before their own. A lot of good and bad things come out of this. The book interested me because it dove into the lives of ancient people and made me think of them in a much different way than I had before. The story was eye-opening, making me think deeply about a lot of things.

Overall, I would recommend this series to anybody who loves new and different books. All of these stories were very diverse, but I view that as a good thing. They are not for everybody because of their oddness. I still recommend it as something to try, because you never know when you will find another book you like!

A Wrinkle in Time: A New Ending

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Today, I will be giving the classic novel “A Wrinkle in Time” a new twist to the ending. For those of you who have never read this book, it is about two siblings (Meg and Charles Wallace Murry) in a family of physicists who encounter three strange people in their town. These people lead the children to investigate their father’s unexplained disappearance. It gives the reader a happy ending, but I will save that for people who wish to read the book themselves.

As I mentioned in my About Me post, I love writing pieces of my own. Although this is technically a school assignment for me, I still think I will enjoy rewriting the end a lot! It allows me to be completely creative with my writing.

So without further ado, here is the ending I envision for A Wrinkle in Time.

Mr. Murry looked away from Meg and Charles Wallace, up to the old farmhouse. He smiled widely and began to tread up the hill it rested on, seeking to find the twins and Mrs. Murry inside. No matter how fast his legs would take him, it could never be fast enough. But he kept his composure and carefully stepped inside the back door.

“Kate?” he called. “Sandy? Dennys?”

He continued to walk through the back of the house, checking each room for a sign of any of them. Alas, the soft sound of footsteps drew him to the kitchen. The smell of a mysterious stew on the stove wafted toward him as he calmly approached his family.

He peered into the kitchen to present himself to his wife and two other sons, but only found the bread baking in the oven and the stew sitting ready on the counter.

“I was certain I heard steps from right here,” he muttered to himself. “Am I hearing things?”

He resumed his search, checking the living room, bedrooms, and even the lab. But still, he had not seen any sign of them. Giving up, he made his way back through the house to return to the yard and ask Meg and Charles Wallace about them.

Click, clack. Click, clack.

Mr. Murry whipped around at the echo of another series of footsteps coming from the kitchen. He paused, then slowly walked down the hallway to look one last time. He hadn’t even reached the doorway when Mrs. Murry turned into the hall and jumped at the sight of him.

For a moment, she almost looked fearful of him, but soon her expression softened to a look of pure gratitude. “Alex? Alex, is that you?” she whispered, her eyes tearing up.

All he did was walk up to her and silently wrap her in an embrace. Mrs. Murry began to sob, not even asking where he had been for all of those years. Just the sight of him seemed to be enough to answer all of her questions in an instant. She recovered quickly and called the twins down from their bedrooms.

At first, Dennys thought that dinner was ready, so he took a seat at the table, but Sandy had caught a glimpse of the two reunited family members and stopped dead in his tracks. “Father?”

Both parents nodded from the hallway. Sandy dragged his twin brother from his seat at the table and rocketed into a group hug. Meg and Charles Wallace had come inside to check on Mr. Murry but eventually joined in themselves. The whole Murry family had been joined together in the biggest celebration of their lives.

Yet through all of the action of the moment, Meg and Charles Wallace stopped to listen to a voice that only seemed to be audible to them.

“I am sorry we did not have time to say goodbye the right way,” the voice spoke. “You see, we must-“

Suddenly, the voices broke away.

The two children had never heard what their three ladies were called to do.

What I had aimed to do in this tweaked ending was to create a more emotional feeling for the reader while also having a key element from the original ending. I followed Mr. Murry because I thought it would be nice to see what he was thinking on his first trip inside the house. I also thought it would be nice to see Mrs. Murry’s unemotional character show some traits that were previously hidden, so this is how I showed that. If you have read or watched A Wrinkle in Time before, how do you think my ending was different? Leave a comment below.

*The image used in this post was taken by me

A Fun Day Trip to the Hocking Hills

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Welcome to another post about the fun adventures I’ve been on! Last Saturday, my mom had to work and my dad is a teacher, so he gets every Saturday off. I was very bored at home. To fix this problem, I decided to drag my dad into taking me to a place called the Hocking Hills.

The Hocking Hills is a group of natural sites and parks with everything from waterfalls and lakes to cliffs and caves. The most popular attractions are Old Man’s Cave, Cedar Falls, and Ash Cave. Now, since I live within half an hour from the Hocking Hills, I have taken multiple hiking trips to those places before. I wanted a new experience, so I went to two parks that sounded interesting: Cantwell Cliffs and Rock House.

This image was taken at Cantwell Cliffs. The first part of the hike was pretty easy, but early on at “the squeeze”, stairs made of rocks got covered in leaves and were quite slippery! You had to be careful of your step to make sure that you didn’t slip and fall on hard rocks. Then the trail broke off into two sections, the Gorge Trail and the Rim Trail.

My dad and I took the Rim Trail, which took you around the side of a couple of cliffs. It sounds intimidating, but it was very safe and kind of easy. After roaming around the bottom of one of the cliffs, the trail led us up the side of the cliff with more rock stairs and then went around to the rim of the cliffs. We got some awesome views from up high on this trail, so I am glad we chose it.

This image was taken at the Rock House, which was actually an unplanned stop. I told my dad on the way home that it sounded interesting, so he took me there to find out. This park’s main point of interest is the house-like formation created by rocks. There were multiple tight squeezes to get into the house. But with Covid and the many people visiting the park that day, I decided not to see what it was like inside.

We continued along the trail to see the little shelf, which the picture above shows. To get up there, I had to climb over and under a few logs (and a few families), but it was worth it! I loved how it felt like I was breaking the rules, even though there were no signs saying you couldn’t go up there.

I loved both of these places, but the Cantwell Cliffs were my favorite. The hike was longer and the sights were prettier. I would love to see both of them again and bring my sister along with me! For more photos and information on all the Hocking Hills parks, click here.

Stonewall Resort

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This is an image I edited using Canva. I love to travel and go on vacation, and last summer I took a trip to Stonewall Resort in West Virginia with my family. We joined two other families there, which we do every summer (except this one), and stayed for about three days. This picture was taken by my sister while we were kayaking. It is hard to determine whether we were on a lake or a river because other people at the resort were telling us that it was twenty-six miles long!

Other things we did here were paddleboarding, sitting on the dock and sleeping, swimming in the pool, and eating at the largest buffet ever. Seriously, the sausages there were an inch and a half wide! I would definitely say that kayaking was the best thing we did there because there was a little tunnel that leads to a very pretty view of the surrounding area. Overall, it was really fun.

This resort has a website where you can take a look. If you would like to see more of it, click here.

The Avatar That is Somewhat Similar to Me

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I created my avatar using Cartoonify. This avatar represents me because she has medium brown hair, light eyebrows, hazel eyes, and a rather serious resting face. My actual hair is slightly longer than hers, reaching about six inches off my shoulders. Out of all things on this avatar, the nose is the most accurate representation of my actual nose. It is round and slightly larger than the average person’s.

The eyes were a really hard part of creating this avatar. I can usually never find an accurate eye color for anything, or even name what color my eyes are. Sometimes they look green, sometimes gray, and sometimes just plain hazel. I think that from a distance, this is what people will think my eyes look like overall.

I never wear turtlenecks, but I thought it looked cool on this person. I think that navy blue is a really nice color on me, but I own next to nothing in that color. Long sleeves are my favorite type of shirt, mostly because my favorite season is winter. I also like to wear my hair down whenever I can because it is the easiest way to get ready in the morning.

It is usually hard to find a way to make an avatar of myself, but this was not too hard. Although it is not a perfect representation of me, it hits the spot pretty well.