I wrote a couple of months ago about an art show called the River Oaks 5x5x5, which I often refer to as the “tiny art” show. It’s one that I entered two years ago and surprisingly had a sketch accepted for the exhibit. That was really early in my return to art, and the quality of what I was doing
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Lately, I’ve been in a bit of an art re-visitation phase. I have been back into the drawing hobby for over two years at this point, which doesn’t seem like a tremendous amount of time on its face, but feels significant to me. The style of artwork and techniques used have changed a lot, and in my view, continue to
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A few months ago, during one of our periodic Texas visits, the family and I got a chance to check out the National Videogame Museum in Frisco. As I’m sure is obvious by my multiple posts about games, I am generally a big fan of them. In fact, my love for video games goes back to my childhood when my
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I’ve done a few posts lately somewhat focused on near-term nostalgia, particularly in comparing how my drawings have changed over the last two years. Right about the time I started really getting into this website (September-ish 2017), I happened to hear about an interesting art show from a coworker. I had mentioned that I sketched something for the first time
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I had to double check because it didn’t seem possible, but it looks like it’s been almost a month since my last drawing. Time really flies sometimes. Okay, not sometimes – pretty much all the time. My last post was about using models and figures to help with portraits, which in my case was some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As
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I generally try to avoid wading into the political on Amdall Gallery. I’ve done it occasionally in the past, like my discussions and data analysis on mass shootings. But this blog is mostly about art, data, and random tech stuff, so I try to keep it in those lanes for the most part. Essentially, my thought is that people probably
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I still feel that overall I am improving as an artist, which is nice to realize after two years of becoming re-involved in this hobby. As I’ve mentioned before, I took a (mostly) ten year break, so it makes me happy that I’m still at it and still learning. It’s not a rapid improvement and I don’t really experience any
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I try to be as forthright as possible on this blog about my experiences with art. The site didn’t really start with a focused goal in mind, but over time, writing has become as much about sharing the struggles as the victories when it comes to this hobby. I hope it helps someone else to see my learning process along
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I surprised myself a bit following my last post by jumping immediately into another project. I hadn’t planned to do so, but I found myself just sort of sitting around Sunday afternoon while my wife and kids taking naps. The previous portrait was a request from one of my co-workers of his dad and two kids. It wasn’t especially taxing,
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Following my brief foray into digital artwork, it felt like time to get back to my usual comfortable pencil-and-paper mode. At this point, I’ve got a pretty substantial computer folder full of ideas, many of which are inspired by Unsplash photos. But before tapping that reservoir, I found myself with a portrait request! Actual subject requests are somewhat rare for
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Welcome to the grand finale of this series of posts on digital artwork! In the first post, I discussed my past struggle with digital art and resurgent interest due to a new tablet purchase (Samsung Galaxy Tab S4). In the second, I talked a bit more about the app I have been using (Autodesk Sketchbook) and my improvements in technique.
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Just over a year ago, I wrote about my first ever attempt at using a tablet and digital pen to draw. I bought an XP-Pen Deco 01 tablet and downloaded Krita’s open source painting software to give it a shot. As I mentioned in last year’s post, this was quite a bit more difficult than I thought it would be.
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In my last post, I discussed using Unsplash images as inspiration for artwork. Although I have a ton of backlogged ideas now, and many of my sketches in the near future will probably be related to Unsplash, I decided to take a brief detour. If you follow this blog already, you are probably aware of how frequently I draw my
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My free time has been pretty well monopolized recently, first with writing a book, and then with figuring out the ins-and-outs of independent publishing. Now that the book is out and that’s mostly off my plate, I hope to have a little more time for drawing. Because I have been somewhat less active on the artwork front, I’ve accumulated a
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Is it Flavor Town or Flavortown? I’m actually not sure. Unfortunately, I don’t know Guy Fieri, so I can’t ask the Mayor of Flavortown about the preferred spelling. Regardless, this is a post about my favorite wild-haired, sandwich-tasting chef on television. For the most part, people know Guy Fieri from one of his shows on the Food Network; the one
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