Photography - cropped photos

I have recently started a photography project at college.  At present I do not own a very expensive camera with all the different modes and changeable lenses but hoping to get one soon.  I use my Nikon bridge camera and my Sony Xperia smart phone to take photos.  I know that using my smart phone is not ' professional ' but I have a 20mp camera with easy to use editing tools.
I was admiring the gorgeous sunset this evening and thought I would see if I could use the crop and straighten feature to create a new better quality picture.  I thought it would be interesting to see what I could come up with because it is always important to learn the basics before jumping in too deep.

I started with an image then cropped the picture to improve it,  I then cropped that image again with focus only on the tree.  I then cropped each previous image to see what I could come up with.  I realised there was an interesting pattern developing so I added a few effects to alter the image.  What I like most is,  that if used out of context there would be no evidence that the pattern originated from a tree.