Since my blog is geared towards discussing the great creators and their works of art, I want to begin by introducing the greatest creator the world has ever known–Elohim, the one and only true Creator. The very first verse in the Bible introduces Him as such when it says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 (ESV) This leaves no doubt as to who the the first creator was. Before the first man breathed or put his will to art, God was creat

My memories in New England are some of the sweetest of our whole trip because I met my best friend in person for the first time. Because I was enjoying my time with her, her siblings and her parents so much, I didn't spend as much time noticing the little quirks about New England as I had other states. However... The largest grievance (and most familiar one) was the roads… Again. This time, it wasn’t just how bad they were—it was the fact that they were acc

New York City was the most surreal place we visited, and now that we've come away from it, I can't really believe we've been there. I suppose I never thought we'd actually visit such a famous place, so it's more or less like we went to the moon. Maybe it still hasn't sunk in that we went. New Jersey/Jersey City: We stayed in New Jersey the week that we visited New York City. The campground we stayed at was off the interstate but sufficiently far away so that we didn

If you will remember, in July (three months ago, I know!) I shared that I was traveling the United States. During a period of two months, I went through 14 different states, spent at least one night in 11 of them, recorded 46 state license plates (I got Hawaii and Alaska!) and 2 Canadian (Quebec and Ontario). During the trip, I couldn't help noticing the differences in culture, topography and weather. I used to live in East Tennessee, so as we headed north, the first sta

Last week, my family and I had the privilege of watching a movie in a theatre. We don’t usually watch anything that way, instead preferring to get a hard copy when it comes out and watch at home. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that it’s expensive for a family of five to go to a theatre often. The second is that there are so few movies we feel comfortable watching without editing/filtering. Last week, we saw Young Washington on the big screen, and today I am

It's been quite awhile since I've written any posts for Shades of Art. Those of you on my email list have already found out why: I left Tennessee and am currently traveling around the U. S.! While I've been writing a good deal the last week or so, the art I've probably been focusing on most is photography (and clearly not blogging.) After all, what better things to take pictures of than the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty or my best friend that I finally met in per

Recently, I had the privilege of watching the 87-year-old movie Gone with the Wind. In some ways, it was a lot better than what I had been expecting. In others, it was disappointing. Without a doubt, though, I'm very glad that I watched it. I'll start with the positives of this movie... The Acting I won't pretend to be a great judge of acting, because I haven't watched enough movies, nor enough of the great actors of all time. However, I thought that Clark Gable an

Those of you on my email list have heard me discussing my newest writing project, one that I feel has a lot of potential. As of this post, I am about 28K words in, and I am really starting to enjoy the characters and plot. I have passed the initial barrier presented by writing in a different genre (one that you can't make up things in 😬). As anything does, my story has become easier to write as I've spent more and more time with it. Before I share a snippet of the story

This post is two weeks late, but if you can believe it (I can't!) I recently celebrated my two-year blogging anniversary. To be honest, "celebrated" sounds so much more exciting than what really happened. What really happened is that I realized it had been two years since I started blogging and that I needed to write a post about it. As a result, I worried when I didn't post it on time. (January 20th, to be exact.) And I'm sure you were making "tsk tsk" noises as each day p

With the writing of this post, I began to realize a couple things about my picture-sharing methods. First of all, it is very often; I appear to be a very visual person. I love to share and receive pictures, so you'll probably get more than you asked for (if you did at all.) Even if a post isn't specifically concerning art, I usually have a lot of photos to go along with it. (An example of such a post is my " Sunshine Blogger Award " post. Another thing I realized about this s