I’ve been on YouTube for more than a year. I achieved my goal of posting videos, but I have learned a lot. In the end, I have decided to just keep doing my day job and try to enjoy drawing rather than turning it into a part time job. I won’t stop completely but here are five reasons why I’ve taken a break from posting short videos on my channel.

1 – I have a lot going on and sometimes it feels good to retreat into privacy.

Life is hectic and there is always a lot going on. I am not a professional youtuber and don’t have a dedicated studio. I just have a desk in a spare bedroom that also happens to be the place where my wife sorts through the laundry. There are old hard drives, random pens, cameras, lenses, headphones and miscellaneous kid things. If I want to make a real video, I’d have to clean all this up and I just don’t have time. The image above is AI generated but looks exactly like my first apartment.

2 – Birthday Parties

I can count on one hand the number of weekends that we’ve had without a kid’s birthday party since the beginning of the year, and I would still have fingers leftover. I am not complaining – but this is just how we spend our time. I think this is how a lot of people my age spend their time, and I hope my kids will appreciate it someday.

3 – Fence repair

This past January, we had a windstorm that broke our fence in the back yard. I spent a fair amount of time just thinking about how to extract the broken posts out of the ground and trying to engineer a solution. Then the weather warmed up just enough in the early spring for us to begin work. I got together with my neighbor and knocked it out over a weekend or two. It wasn’t too bad, but projects and home ownership in general takes a lot of time. So at the end of the day, if I have a few minutes to draw, it will likely not be something worth posting online. But I still try to draw anyway.

4 – Summer is approaching

Summer is a very special time, but also a very busy time. I feel like I have more time to draw in the winter when there’s not much to do outside. But now when the weather is warming up, I can’t help but go outside and find something to do, whether is lounging in the sunshine with a cup of tea or getting dirty and doing some yard work.

5 – More focus on the creative process of drawing rather than creating ‘content’

My landscape drawing Youtube shorts were doing well actually. Then one day I posted one that I thought was even better than the last, but it got hardly any views, and that was discouraging. So, I took a step back and realized that rather than trying to draw what people want to see, I’d rather draw what I want, work on my skills and experiment with different ideas.

Does this mean I won’t ever be posting again on YouTube? It feels silly to write this because I really was just getting started with my channel. I think it will just serve as a place where I can post occasionally and not have to pay for the storage. I plan to focus more on this blog. It’s much easier to write for a few minutes than to decide what to draw, write a script, record a video and do a narration. And besides, people still read blogs, right?

Here’s a shot of Mt. Spurr taken 2025-03-31 from the Glenn Alps trail head overlook. We took my old “boss” David up there for some sightseeing.

While we were there, a paraglider landed next to us. She was very nice, answering all of our questions that she’s probably been asked a thousand times from other bystanders. And funnily enough, we actually had a mutual friend in common.