30 Days of Thankfulness- Creativity

Our internet has been down recently because Cupcake chewed through one of the internet cords. Brandon patched it up with some tape and we're waiting for a new cord to come in the mail. Anyway, here is the post I wrote yesterday on Word so I could post it here whenever our magical internet came back!

Creativity brings so many wonderful things to the world: music, art, literature. I love music. I can play a few songs on a few instruments, and I enjoy singing. Life without music would be terribly boring. I like art. I like visiting museums and looking through art books. I love reading. I can't imagine a life without books. I can't imagine living in a place that censors what people read. I may  not like everything that is in my public library system (*cough* A HUNDRED COPIES OF FIFTY SHADES OF GREY *cough*), but I am proud that my library does not allow for censorship and all sorts of viewpoints are represented in our collection. Books provide entertainment, knowledge, and an escape. Some of my favorite books are the Harry Potter series, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series, most of Jodi Picoult and Sarah Dessen's books, anything about animals, and lots of stuff that makes me laugh (like The Onion and Pearls Before Swine collections.)

I’m also thankful for the creativity that I possess. I like writing jokes and relaying funny stories to make people laugh. I feel proud when I can use my writing skills to write posts on here or on social media websites that make people think. I also love to draw. This is something I discovered fairly recently. I dropped out of art class in high school to take yearbook instead, but the one project I did earned me an A and a shout-out from my teacher. Since then, I hadn’t thought much about my artistic ability. Then, I had the opportunity to draw some characters for our meeting room at work. My coworker was telling me about all the nice pictures of storybook characters another branch had hung up in their meeting room (where storytimes are held) and mentioned that she wished we could do something like that, too. Around the same time, she asked if I could find some pictures of Dr. Seuss characters we could hang up for an upcoming Seuss birthday storytime. I decided to try drawing a character instead of printing one out, and it turned out fantastically, if I do say so myself. Since then I have drawn several more children’s characters for our library (we usually put them on scrapbook paper and then laminate them to hang up), including Elephant and Piggy, Madeline, Babar, Spot, Pigeon, and several others. After doodling a passable Pikachu on a birthday card, my husband asked me to draw all the Pokemon. I’m not sure why. He says he wants to hang them up around the house. But did you know there are like 600 of those things now? When I was in middle school and Pokemon was really popular, there were only 150. Anyway, it gives me something to do when I’m bored, and I’m really proud when a project turns out well. There are so few things in life I think I’m good at. Drawing (and coloring with Crayola crayons- I refuse to use any other) is one of them. I’m not an artist, but I do enjoy exercising my creativity in this way. 

So I'm thankful for creativity- mine and the creativity of others. 

This is the first drawing I did for our meeting room at work. 

I drew this on Thursday at a family Thanksgiving gathering. At a different Thanksgiving gathering, I had decided it would be cool if someone made some lawn decorations of a team of walruses pulling Santa's sleigh. So I decided to draw it. I'm not quite finished with it yet, but I think it looks pretty cool.