Poll: Best Drawing Time-Lapse Method?

Posted on February 7, 2022 by Jon Amdall One comment

Buried deep towards the end of my last post, I posed the question, “which style of time-lapse drawing progression is your favorite?” I embedded a crowdsignal poll with some options I’ve used. I have long struggled trying to figure out which is truly the “best.” The slideshow-style .gif images are the easiest to make, but it seems like videos are the most informative. And the 1 minute videos are the easiest for views to consume, but are they as informative as longer ones? Finding the optimal, balanced solution is the name of the game here!

Anyhow, since the question was way back in the 10th paragraph when I originally shared it, I figured I’d devote a separate write-up just to sharing this poll. I am quite curious how people perceive these, and which style they get the most value from. Maybe devoting an entire post to the topic will help towards that end?

I think it might be helpful to provide a couple of examples of the options I’ve included in this poll. Most of these progression types can be found on the YouTube channel, but I’ll provide one for each of the five choices below. I wish I had another method for embedding the poll itself…but if anyone just isn’t seeing it or can’t get it to work, feel free to leave a comment with your vote! I should be able to use comments to manually add to the tallies.

Poll Question: Which style of time-lapse drawing is your favorite? Five options…

.Gif Image Slideshow:

1 Minute Video w/ Music

Short Video (5-7 Min) w/ Music

Long Video (10-15+ Min) w/ Music

Real Time/Normal Speed w/ Talking

Now, there were a couple of hiccups when it came to putting this post together. The first is something I referred to earlier, which is that apparently these polls or survey widgets don’t always seem to show up. Specifically, they don’t really play well with the WordPress Reader or when using an adblocker. Both of which I use frequently! So, the actual poll questions might be difficult to see for some readers. A quick test to see if this impacts you is to just look at the top of the post – in theory though you should see the poll right at the beginning.

The second challenge I had was a visual/aesthetic one. I’m so accustomed to having artwork associated with every post at this point, it’s sort of difficult to figure out a good thumbnail without it. For some older tech-related posts, I’ve managed to whip together something (like with this one about monetization). This time, I thought it might be fun to draw a quick sketch of a guy holding a blank sign, then paste a screen capture of the poll onto it. I browsed through some stock photos until I found a decent enough pose that would work for my wide headers. It was a pretty quick drawing, about 25 minutes in all. Here’s how it looks:

And although this was a very fast one, I did actually record video while I drew. I made this one into a “1 minute time-lapse,” which is option #2 in the poll. I have no clue if that one will end up as the top choice, but it certainly seems like the easiest to digest and the most appealing from a time investment standpoint. On the flip side, by far the most watched YouTube videos on the Amdall Gallery channel fall into the “long video” category. And an additional consideration is related to video processing and compression…basically, the more I speed up a video beyond it’s natural state, the worse it seems to look. So, basically what I’m saying is that I have no idea what the right answer is! Which, if I’m being totally honest, is probably true for like 95-ish% of things related to drawing, creating, and sharing art.

The progression video is below:

And I’ve hastily embedded some materials below. I try to make these related to the post at hand, so I’ve included the camera arm I use at my desk. I’m not sure why I threw my book in there too, but hey maybe that’s related somehow. I can only fit four in the widget, and I often pick the same ones over and over. So I figured I’d mix it up a bit this time!