I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I value different technological tools I have at my disposal, particularly those large scale online services I use. And a natural follow up thought is about contributing to those online ecosystems I actually value. For a long time, I’ve held to the stubborn notion that I only wanted to use social media
Read more
There was a point in time, just a few years ago, when I typically referred to Amdall Gallery as both an art and data analysis blog. In fact, I still even have it in the sub-title at the top of the site. I’ve been consistently writing posts every month since August 2017 (almost five years running now), and at the
Read more
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
Read more
One of the early pandemic projects I started was to transition from progression .gif slides of my drawing process into full time-lapse videos. I created a YouTube channel to host them, rather than take up my precious WordPress hosting storage space with large video files. I’ve had the YouTube channel now for about a year, and in that time, I’ve
Read more
I’ve been tinkering with this website pretty consistently over the last three-and-a-half years. Throughout that time, I have maintained interest in ways I could make the website pay for itself. Portrait art and web development are hobbies for me, so I have never really sought to monetize them heavily, but I have long believed it would be nice if web
Read more
In a couple of ways, I consider this post to be somewhat of a do-over. Months ago, I shared a YouTube video on my relatively new channel covering some details on outline sketches and measurement. Although I was happy with the discussion portion, I was not very satisfied with the artwork that resulted. I wanted to make another outline/pre-drawing video
Read more
It’s been quite a busy last month or so. The family and I finally made our long-delayed moved to Texas. It’s something that’s been in the works since late February, and we made the leap a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit of a trial though; the movers were late, ran out of room on their truck, and
Read more
As of today, Amdall Gallery’s new YouTube channel is live! Its main purpose is to share some progression videos; if you’re familiar with my typical posts, I often include still frame .gif images to provide a small window into how my portraits come together. Some people find these .gifs useful, but they usually aren’t more than seven or eight images
Read more
If my “archive categories” widget is to be believed, at this point I’ve written 115 art-related posts on this website. That’s pretty surprising to me, but I guess they add up over time. Through all of that text about artwork, it seems I’ve developed a pattern to my writing. I hope it doesn’t come off as robotic, but I do
Read more
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
Read more
In April, I did a series of posts expressing my appreciation for visitors, readers, and subscribers to Amdall Gallery, and opened up a giveaway as small gesture of thanks. The prize was small (essentially $20 or custom artwork), but there were far more entries than I expected! I was thinking maybe a dozen or so people would stumble across it and roll
Read more
Welcome to part two of three in a series of posts thanking readers, and taking a step back to review Amdall Gallery’s status as we approach a subscriber milestone. In the first, I dropped a poll asking what sort of giveaway subscribers might be interested in, and shared a few cool artists I’ve come across through working on this website.
Read more
To my continued surprise, this website has gained more subscribers than I ever would have expected. When I resurrected Amdall Gallery from the ancient blog burial grounds last August, I assumed I would mostly get traffic from friends and family. As it turns out though, WordPress has a large and supportive community of artists, painters, poets, and authors who interact
Read more
This website is a hobby, and one of the main motivations behind it is that I enjoy making tweaks and trying new features. In fact, I love trying new themes and widgets so much, I’ve even made dummy sites that have already been mothballed. On Amdall Gallery, I recently got to a point where there wasn’t much more I could
Read more
A few weeks ago, I was thinking about my two Twitter accounts; one personal and one for this site. I was wondering if there was a tool that would allow me to export or web-scrape my Twitter history into .xls or .csv, so I could crank out some pivot tables. There may be multiple ways to do this, but I
Read more