CAS blog of L. G.

Having to spend most of my time by the desk I can really feel the lack of exercise in my daily life. Now, when the exams are so close I feel deprived of physical activities even more. However, it’s not an excuse to choose the elevator instead of the stairs or take a bus instead of walking. This month was supposed to be dedicated  to walking 10000 steps a day, but it appeared to be much more difficult than I expected. I assumed that I usually was walking most of that amount but I was surprised to acknowledge that I barely could get to half of that. Therefore, it was much more of a challenge to walk 10000 steps than I initially anticipated. First of all, I found it hard to keep up with the fixed number of steps. I always managed to get 5000 steps but to double that I had to make a significant effort. Sometimes it even required a few (or more) circles around my neighborhood before coming home form school. Before this moth I believed that I enjoy walking but it wasn’t that fun after...

We all know that it's important to move your body each day to be healthy, however at the moment I'm tied to my laptop behind the desk almost 24/7 and I can definitely feel the stiffness of my body due to the lack of exercise or simple walking. Luckily, I discovered stretching as one of the forms of exercise that does not require as much muscle strength as simple consistence. I decided to make a two-week-plan of different combinations of stretching exercises to help me in being persistent. To my surprise it actually made me stick to the plan most of the time as I didn't have to look for the exercises simply wasting time. Even though I skipped a few days, I still found that this was very beneficial for my physical condition and even helped me to sleep better. I didn't expect for my muscles to hurt though, but I could feel them the second day after stretching. Despite the unpleasant feeling, it made me feel that I do the stretching right and motivated me to continue to ...

For most people colouring books associate with childhood; however, there is a new trend going for a while now which is colouring books for adults. Books stores' shelves are loaded with such books and it seems that almost everyone has one at home now. The reason behind all of this is that it is claimed that colouring helps to relieve stress and even strongly assimilates meditation. As I have already tried meditating in the past and really enjoyed it, I thought it would be interesting to try out colouring as an alternative. Luckily, I already had a mandala pattern book at home which I didn't really get a chance to try out and it seemed a great opportunity to finally do it.  I coloured one mandala per week the whole month and each week I tried to choose more and more complex pattern. The first one was pretty easy and it required only a few colours, but the other ones got me really struggling while matching multiple colours together. I didn't expect that this supposedly rela...

Food waste is a major problem of contemporary world. While ones throw away food on a daily basis, the others starve and struggle to provide food for their families due to absence of proper monetary means. This surprising paradox is still prevailing in my country despite its high level of development. Personally, I was raised to always finish my food and never throw it away, but seeing my friends constantly do so made me realize that the problem is much more prevailing than I thought it was. This kind of realization encouraged me to look for additional ways I would be able to contribute to decreasing food waste. Luckily, I was already familiar with 'Food bank', which is an organization arranging food gatherings in supermarkets twice a year. After volunteering at 'Food bank' for the second year in a row, I thought I knew everything about this organization, but it appeared I was completely wrong. One of my classmates shared that she was going to volunteer at their sto...

It's not a secret that the world's 'health' is relatively rapidly deteriorating and the main reason for that is human-induced activities. People are often not even aware of the consequences that their actions bring to Earth and as a person of the new generation I feel accountable to awaken the sense of responsibility in such people. That's exactly what prompted me to make environment-concerning bookmarks. As always, it was a few of us who decided to cooperate and make enough bookmarks to be able to leave them in our school library for others to use and get informed or inspired to reduce waste, pollution or any other harmful activity that they might be contributing to.  In total, I made three bookmarks concerning industrial pollution, daily waste and deforestation. My goal was to make them simple in content but still bearing an important meaning. Overall, it wasn't challenging to draw the bookmarks because before drawing I spent a whole hour searching for suit...

There's something special about being able to commemorate certain moments of your life and review them whenever you want. I always admired this about photography, but also found it bothering that nowadays those moments in photographs are usually artificially posed and do not reflect the real world. This time I decided to take it as an advantage and try creating something surreal out of real photos. For this I used an app called "Pic Blender" which actually gives away the whole idea behind this small experiment of mine. I wanted to try to overlap different pictures in order to create unusual and creative pictures. At first, I tried numerous other apps before discovering "Pic Blender" but even though they all seemed to have a variety of functions, the quality of the final picture was completely ruined. Luckily, "Pic Blender" maintained most of the initial picture's quality and I was able to experiment with it. It took some time for me to understan...

I've always used to come across the word 'doodle' but it never appeared to me that it was a form of art until I actually searched what it looks like. It's a combination of simple drawings made with a black pen and not even necessarily bearing a certain meaning. The simplicity and freedom of choice in this drawing form instantly made me want to try it out myself as I've always been interested in drawing with only a black pen.  I'll be honest, it looks much easier that it actually is. It was extremely hard for me to draw without a pencil sketch as I'm used to perfecting the drawing with a pencil and eraser and only then outlining with something permanent. So, doodling was definitely a totally new experience for me but I truly enjoyed it. To ease my way into the new art form I firstly chose to draw space-related doodles which was quite simple as it was only a combination of circles and lines (also dots). I was very proud with the end and decided to try doodl...