Posts
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Five reasons why I’ve taken a break from YouTube
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?
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Mt Spurr
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.
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On the beach…
Here’s one from our trip to Seward last weekend. This is on the beach in front of Miller’s Landing. I recorded a YouTube short for it here.
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Tugboat and Barge
Hey Everyone
Here is a sketch from a photo I took on my phone back in 2021. We must have been on a walk or something on the coastal trail and I decided to take a picture of the barge in the water.
I think it may be two vessels – a tugboat and a barge sitting next to each other.
Anyway, I used a 0.5mm mechanical pencil with a graphite hardness of ‘B’, blending stump for the clouds and a 3B pencil for the dark spots down in the deadly mud flats below.
Tugboat and Barge in the Cook Inlet -
Let’s draw a squirrel on the fence.
Hey everyone, Steve here for another drawing session. If you’re an artist, I’m going to let you in on a little secret – get a camera and keep it handy. It can be the one on your phone or something more advanced. Take a lot of pictures, and try to get a feel for what makes a photo interesting because a lot of that skill also applies to drawing.
Over time, your photo library will grow and you’ll have a lot of material to work from – it feels a lot less like cheating when you reference your own photos.
Now a lot of people swear by drawing from observation, but there are some things that that just won’t work for – and squirrels are one of them. They are just too fast. Drawing from a reference is ok and it doesn’t have to be copied pixel by pixel – you’re not a printer. You are free to edit the composition, add things that aren’t there and anything else you can think of.
Maybe you’ll notice I’m not just using pencil for this one – I’m adding some ink to make some
Dark shadows and details. I think it makes pencil work a lot more interesting. In photography, the difference between the darkest shadows and brightest highlights is called dynamic range, and so I’m trying to make the shadows darker than graphite allows.
Anyway, thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one. Goodbye for now.
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Mountain sunset sketch
Hey everyone,
Thanks for tuning in. It’s a sunny, but lazy Saturday so let’s do a quick sketch here in my sketchbook. For this one I’m using a 3H pencil and a 12B faber castell matte pencil. The scene I’m drawing is along the turnagain arm just south of Anchorage. You can see a few chunks of ice sitting in the frozen mud.
Also a quick thank you to everyone who came to my birthday party last week and for the thoughtful gifts and wonderful artwork, I am grateful to have such good friends.
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A Self Portrait
Me Drawing Me Is it weird to draw yourself? Every drawing is a form of self expression, but this is the most direct form of that expression. For me, drawing is a hobby and I tend to focus more on the skill than the creativity, but the result is the same, the manifestation of an extension of the self that persists afterwards. And that is one of the reasons I keep doing this.
Watch this link – a youtube short of me drawing me on my channel @oneofthesteves.
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Inkvember Doodles
A doodle from my noodle. New Video on YouTube.
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Isometric Cityscape
An isometric cityscape, the likes of which I might have drawn as a kid, contains elements from real life – a reflection of random thoughts on paper. In the upper right corner is a garden that we built this summer in our front yard. It was designed to match the neighbors’ garden. On the left is some industrial process equipment, similar to things I’ve seen on job sites when I worked in the field. There’s also a train, because in the future there will be more trains.
In the drawing, I started out just scribbling with one of my fountain pens, but I quickly felt lost so I picked up a pencil and sketched out a rough idea of where I wanted to take the drawing. Then I continued with the ink and at the end I decided to add some color so I picked out a nice palette of prismacolors and filled it in.
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