Friday Night Chill and Sketch : 04.25.25

Hey everybody, happy Friday! It is, uh, April 25th. Yeah, 2025. I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with The Inkspired Life, where I love sketching architecture and urban sketching. Hope you're having a great day. Um, I'm excited. Friday's here, weekend's here, it's all good. So I, um, I had a really cool field trip yesterday. I took a bunch of students into New York City with a couple of teachers, and we had an amazing day. We explored Rockefeller Center, Bryant Park, and St. Patrick's Cathedral. And what was really, really cool was having my students actually sketching there live, doing urban sketching in Bryant Park. Man, it was like a dream come true. It was a field trip I've been wanting to do since I started teaching 6 years ago, and it finally happened. So, uh, I'm a real happy camper this week, and it just goes to show patience and persistence payoff. Yeah, so if you're watching live, let me know in the comments where you're watching from, how your day's going. I would love to know all of that fun stuff. And I just want to open this up here and make sure everything looks good on my end. It does. All right, cool. So what I want to do tonight is two things. Um, it'll be a fairly quick live stream. I'm going to go on live for about maybe 20 minutes. Um, I want to do a quick sketchbook tour of urban sketching I did last Saturday in New York City. Um, it was a beautiful day, got out there with my, uh, sketching gear including the Lockbie Folio you see here, and I'll just run through, show you guys some of the sketches I did. Maybe we'll add some color to them, I'm not sure. Maybe we'll sketch something else. We'll see what happens. It's Friday night, just time to chill and do some sketching. All right, let me just adjust the volume here. All right, so cool. Um, Lopifolio— I, I brought this into the city with me along with my small backpack and some other gear. I'll be posting some video of the gear I took. You can also visit my website. I have a page that has a list of my tools and materials on it. If you go to theinkspiredlife.com, tools and materials, you should see it there. All right, so here's the Lockbie Field Journal. I took this with me. I able to keep some Sharpie creative markers in there. I did not add color when I was there. Last Saturday. Everything was done in black and white, which, uh, I love black and white sketches. Here's a really cool sketch of the skyline, um, showing right here One World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower. I really like the way this came out. It's very loose. You can see a couple of cranes here, and here's the Freedom Tower. Pretty iconic. This is a sketch of the Whitney Museum. So we were down near Little Island. If you ever walked the High Line in New York City, or if you haven't, I really recommend it. The High Line is a really cool elevated walkway, um, they turned into basically a park. You walk along it and you can see all these amazing buildings. And all the way at the end of the High Line, the south end, is the Whitney Museum. So here's the Whitney Museum, really interesting building. Kind of put it up here so you can see it bigger. Pretty cool. So these sketches I'm showing you were all done there in person. We were there about, let's see, 10, 11, 12, 1, probably about 3.5 hours I spent sketching. Very cool. Hey, Kai's in the house! Kai, how are you? Hope you're doing great. Great to see you. Um, we need to connect, so I think Maddie shared my info. Oh, feel free to contact me anytime. It's great to see you. I appreciate you. Cool. So here's a view of the Whitney Museum. These sketches were all done with the Sharpie here. Well, not this one. This was done with my red Pilot Precise pen. This is actually a view I had. There's a Shake Shack. I'm loving Shake Shack. My stomach is not. Um, but there's a Shake Shack where I ate lunch underneath part of the High Line, the elevated walkway. And this was a view I had when I was sitting out at my table, so I figured I'd do a little sketch while I was sitting there. Um, something really cool happened while I was having lunch at Shake Shack. One of the employees was there outside kind of sweeping and cleaning tables, and I was talking with him, and I had a sketch of Shake Shack that I did the week before when I was visiting in North Carolina. I had it with me in here, and I gave the guy the sketch. That I did in— of the Shake Shack in North Carolina, and he was so appreciative and we chatted for a few minutes. He actually brought it inside to show his manager. So, um, maybe next time I go back we'll see the sketch hanging up. So it was really cool just to give away a piece of artwork. These couple of next sketches are from the Meatpacking District. I love the architecture there. It's kind of old industrial architecture, a lot of brick structures. This was a real quick capture of like a perspective scene. I threw in a little bit of red pen just to kind of give it some color to indicate brick. Uh, here's another view, the same area, the Meatpacking District. In this you can actually see a skybridge across here. I think skybridges are amazing structures, really, really cool. I'm kind of fascinated with them, so I always try to take pictures and sketch them when I see them. So you could see the Skybridge in the background. I sketched some people kind of in the foreground, quick, loosey-goosey, but it was fun sitting there. And I had a couple people stop by and, and take a look at what I was doing. Um, I actually called this one here Fist Bump Alley. Fist Bump Alley. That's because when I was sketching this, a guy came by for like a minute or two and gave me a fist bump as he was leaving. He thought it was pretty cool that I was sketching, so I just named it Fist Bump Alley. Bump bump bump. So let me know in the chat if you're watching and if you have questions, comments, or if you like sketching, why, why do you like sketching? Or what kind of artwork do you do? Or what's your creative thing? I'm always interested to know what you guys are into as well. Absolutely. All right, let's move on to the next one. All right, my phone was up— they had an update there. All right, boom, next flip. This is also done in the same area, that Meatpacking District. I'll be posting videos, um, and maybe photos of this area so you can get a better sense of it. So look for a future post on Instagram, and yet TikTok. I said TikTok. Um, I have an amazing human being who is helping me out with my social media right now, so shout out to Maddie wherever you are. She's inspiring me, she's helping me. We're, uh, trying to rebrand and give things a fresh look, so I love that. So you'll be seeing a lot more stuff on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. Um, I love— this is a really cool building, also a brick building. I like when I'm sketching outdoors, um, urban architecture, I like to sketch lamp posts. You can see a lamp post here. So just, it's fun to include some of the environment that's kind of around the buildings. So that's a— that was a fun sketch. This might be one of my faves in here. I don't know the name of this building. I have to look it up. Pretty cool modern looking building. Here's, here's a good example of using hatch lines, these diagonal lines. Hatch lines are a great way to indicate shadow and give depth to your sketches. So I'll bring it closer. You can kind of see it there, those diagonal lines. And if you look at the windows on here, the windows aren't like hard-edged rectangles. They're kind of loose, and they're actually really just vertical lines on here. So when you're sketching details, don't feel like you always need to sketch everything precisely. You can shorthand things and catch things kind of fast in different ways. Why do, why do I sketch fast? I've had that question before. I guess one of, one of the reasons I started sketching fast was back in architecture school. I had to be able to get ideas out of here out of my head onto paper as quickly as possible so I could talk to my professors, get feedback from my professors. Um, they had other students besides me, so if I wasn't ready to show them or talk to them or communicate with them visually, they were on to the next student. So I was really forced to be kind of quick and fast with my sketching. That has stayed with me since architecture school, and it's really cool, especially for sketching, um, city environments. Cities have an energy, you know, a kind of a fast-paced vibe. So when I'm kind of sketching here quick— quickly, I'm feeling the energy of where I'm located. I'm capturing that, that vibe on paper. This is another view of the Whitney Museum. Um, this is over, um, what is this? Is a fire— this is a fire station building right on the water, kind of a very modern looking building. Uh, it was a really interesting to sketch this. There's a kind of a fireboat, little tiny fireboat here. I'm sorry, I don't know the exact name. And shout out to all the firefighters out there, you guys are incredible. I could not do what you do. You guys are amazing. So this was a cool little fire station. This is a sketch over by Pier 57. You see the 57 here. So Pier 57, really cool, um, area. Pier 57 has a lot of restaurants in there. There's a roof, public rooftop plaza or rooftop deck area here. So this is actually the Pier 57 building on the right. On the left we have Little Little Island is a really cool structure, and we'll talk more about that on another show. I have— I did a couple of other quick sketches of Little Island. Really interesting, revitalized, great example of adaptive reuse in architecture and landscape architecture. Adaptive reuse is reusing something that was there for a new purpose. I think this was an old pier out here. And they built this park up around the pier area. This is, this is actually a sketch I did while I was on Little Island. There's an amphitheater on Little Island, and I just kind of sketched a small section of it. Um, this is a fun sketch. I tried to show some people hanging out there as well. Um, this was a sketch I did on the way back, heading back towards the bus station. This was on the High Line, so I was sitting here looking out, had a really cool vista of the street here, so I wanted to capture a little perspective sketch. And this is the iconic Empire State Building. Ta-da! Yeah, so I sat, I sat down, had a view of the Empire State Building, just did a really quick sketch of that while I was there. And this is a small section of, um, oh my gosh, Penn Station, Penn Station, the exterior, the entryway. I think that's all I did that day. Yeah, that is all I did that day, that day last week. Um, it was a lot of fun out being out there urban sketching. I loved it. Cool. So what time is it? 8:15. I'm going to go on for 10 minutes and maybe we'll do a— let's do a quick St. Patrick's Cathedral sketch. I'm going to sketch that. I have some paper here. We're going to sketch that on some watercolor paper. Right here. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit on the camera so you guys can see it better. I think that should be better. Awesome. All right, so let's do a little bit of St. Patrick's here. I have an image. I'll show you the image I'm looking at. I took a photograph when I was there yesterday on our field trip. I'm going to use this as a just a guide. So here's St. Patrick's Cathedral, an interesting perspective kind of looking up at it. I like the angle, it's different, it's not a straight-on shot. A pro tip: if you're in New York City, be sure to look up. I mean, it's— when you look up in here and you see the buildings and perspective kind of merging together you get really cool, interesting shapes happening and patterns. Buildings look distorted because of the way they're perspective, the way they're going back in space. So in this picture, you can see St. Patrick's right at the bottom. The building looks really wide and then it gets narrow as it goes up. So it's kind of, so it's a distorted view. And for me, that just adds another layer of interest into sketching. Something. So always look at what you're sketching, whether it's a building or a flower or your lunch. It doesn't matter what you're sketching. Look at it from different angles, different perspectives. Um, if it's something you can rotate, like here I have my water bottle, you know, you can look at it this way, you can look at it this way, you can look at it this way, right? There's endless possibilities. So don't be afraid to look at objects from different viewpoints. It might inspire you and and your creativity in different ways. All right, cool. Let's do a quicko— quicko, yeah, I just made that word up— a quicko sketch, a quick sketch of the, uh, St. Patrick's Cathedral here. Cool. I'm gonna grab a drink of water. Feel free to say hi if you're just joining us. Welcome to— what should we call this? Freeform Sketch Friday? Free Flow Sketch Friday. We need a good name for this. Um, I'm only on for a few minutes, about 20 minutes tonight. Just want to give a quick sketchbook tour from my visit last weekend to New York City. And let's do another quick sketch here. All right, good. I'm just going to open this ref pic here. All right, let's do it. Let's just make sure my pen is— aha, I need a new Sharpie. This one has un-Sharpied. All right. I always have backup Sharpies, the man says as he's looking for one. What are the odds that I don't have a Sharpie nearby? Oh my gosh, if you're watching, this is historic. Oh wait, wait, never mind, got one. I— there's rarely a time I don't have a Sharpie with me somewhere or within grabbing distance. All right, cool. So I'm sketching, I'm sketching this in a distorted view based on that picture I showed you, so it's going to look a little funky, and that's cool. I want it to be funky. I never sketch— I didn't say never, but I rarely sketch architecture to capture things photorealistically. I want to capture the vibe, the spirit, maybe the overall shapes, the angles. For me, photography is the way to capture it as we see it, although obviously you can sketch, um, you can capture things very creatively with photography. But that's, for me, is the way I can capture all the details. And I actually love photographing. I have like 7— 78,000 photos and videos in my storage right now on my phone, the phone cloud. All right, see, I'm thinking too much instead of just sketching. There's something ironic about listening to Metallica while I'm sketching St. Patrick's. They both have energy, uh, different kinds of energy, right? But music fires me up. Music inspires me, my creativity, my sketching, my thinking. I can't live without it. There you go. So that's just a really quick sketch based on the photograph I, I took. Um, I like it. I like to leave a lot of white area, kind of let this bleed off a little bit. Same thing on the other end. I didn't sketch all the details happening up here. There's kind of lines going on there. I really wanted to capture, for me, kind of this arched entryway into, into the church. So I focused mostly on this section for this sketch I did. I like this. I like the shadows in here. I could come back, throw some watercolor on here or some ink, pop things out differently. Or I could use my Sharpie creative markers as well, which, you know what, maybe I'll do that to wrap up. Why not? Should I? Let's see, where are they? Oh yeah, of course I know where they are. They're in here. Silly me. Alrighty, I'm just putting some something peppier on here. Let's see. Boom, we're good. All right, just for fun, I'm going to play around some Creative Markers here and just throw colors on. Um, for me, colors kind of just happen. I'm not trying to replicate any of the colors that are there. I'm just grabbing and going with what I have on hand just to be playful and kind of to kind of just challenge myself. So let's see what we got going here. Hey, Noel's in the house! Noel, how are you? Do you have a playlist of music you like to listen to when you're like— when you're sketching? Hey Noel, great to see you. Hope all's well. Uh, sorry I missed, missed, um, the live today. School, school stuff. It's great to see you. You know what, that's a great question. I do have a playlist that I'm listening to. I could probably even share that at some point where people could listen to the same music I'm listening to. I think that's maybe what you're getting at. That's a cool idea. I can't play the music out loud because it's copyrighted, but you could always listen along at home on your own Spotify. That's a super cool idea. Love it, love it. All right, let's just throw down color, guys. I also bought these two colored pencils. We're gonna maybe throw down— these are— I have not used this brand yet. Caran d'Ache, or Caran d'Ache. It's French. I took Spanish for 5 years in high school and middle school. Oh, it's Swiss-made. Never mind. I don't know how we say it. Caran d'Ache. But anyway, we'll try them out. All right. It's all about having fun, guys. Just be yourself. When I sketch, I used to be so afraid of sketching in front of people, afraid of making mistakes. Afraid of expressing, expressing who I was, afraid of throwing color down. Fear, fear, fear, fear of not being good enough compared to other people. And it shut me down. I, I felt kind of stuck. I kind of felt kind of stale, stagnant, because I wasn't being able to be myself doing something I love doing. Um, unless I did it privately. So it was kind of interesting— it's been interesting over the years just to kind of break out and play around. And one of the things that really helped me with that was having a playful mindset. I'm here just playing around. It's a playground, it's a sandbox for experimentation, for having fun. I'm not here to compete with anyone other than myself. I just want to make myself better at what I'm doing. I don't mind looking. I love looking at other artists and sketchers and artwork, you know, for inspiration and seeing what they're doing. I don't look at it to, to badmouth myself or to make myself feel kind of down. Um, that is not a good thing to do. Be who you are. I mean, look, I'm throwing yellow down and Aqua. So this is a great example of grab-and-go creativity. I'm just literally picking up what I have around me here. I really like the blue color for that shadow. It kind of pulls it in deeper, right? Let me know, let me know in the chat, guys. Do you think it would be cool next time I stream If I kind of give you a link to the playlist I'm listening to? I love that idea, Noel. Thank you so much. Let's try some of these, uh, colored pencils. Lots of times before I sit down and sketch, I'll come up with a creative intention You know, what kind of outcome do I want tonight with what I'm doing? You know, am I going to focus on maybe shapes, shadows, um, scale of something, capture or exaggerate the architecture? Am I just going to be playful, throw down some color? And by setting a creative intention before you sit down and do your sketching it kind of puts your brain in a certain mindset, right? It, it almost kind of locks it in here, like, okay, as I'm doing this, this is kind of my goal. Um, so creative intentions have always a great— for me, a great way to kind of keep on task. And I don't mean it sounds so stringent, but to keep your brain maybe on task, and that way I'm only expecting maybe one kind of result or outcome. So for example, if my creative intention tonight was to mess around with color and just try these new color pencils, that's all I want to do. I'm doing it right, I'm learning what I like about them, what I don't like about them, and I'll know next time I go to use them what I could do better or how I can use them differently. So don't be afraid to set creative intentions. We're going to put red on here. Yeah, my brain just said red. You could tell when I'm, when I'm doing this stuff, my brain's in a lot of different directions because it's kind of firing rapid fire. It's because I love this, that's why. My favorite way to add red to any of my sketches is right here. Boom! Is a Pilot Precise red pen. This is a V7. I love the way red looks on out of this pen. That's the red I used here, what I showed you on these quick sketches. This is the same pen. They bleed really nicely too. Um, I don't have my watercolor brush right here, otherwise I'd bleed some ink. We'll do that another night, but I'll show you how that you can actually bleed the ink and kind of paint with it. But for fun, let's just throw some on here so you can see what it looks like. It just, it just happens to be my favorite red color. I have a red Creative Marker. They're pretty awesome too. Alright, cool. And we're gonna do one last thing on this before I wrap up tonight, guys. I haven't used— I haven't used— it's kind of become a signature color that I use in a lot of my sketches, uh, neon pink. Awesome. So I'm gonna throw down some neon pink. Neon pink for me is a way just to punch things out, make it more whimsical. When I see this color, I think, I think whimsy, whimsical, fun. I just kind of touch it down in some places. I don't do the whole— I don't do big areas of the pink because it would be too powerful. I actually am digging this. And I lied, I do want to do one thing. Sometimes when you add Creative Markers, it takes over ink, over the Sharpie, it takes away the Sharpie. You could always come back with a Sharpie or even a black— I have a black Creative Marker. Let's show you the black Creative Marker, and you could pull out lines again. So sketching is sometimes about layers, about adding layers on top of layers, like watercolor, you add layers. Watercolor, you can actually take layers off. You know, if you have a clean brush and water, you can kind of dab it on your paper, lift off the paint. I can't really do that with what I'm doing, but if you are watercoloring, think of layers as being additive, or sometimes you can subtract as well. And I'm just going to take this Sharpie marker. I just want to pull— it's going to be dark and heavy, and I know that. Very bold. Sometimes you just got to go for it, guys. Just be bold. It's only paper, it's only markers, it's only ink. Is this beautiful? No. Was it fun to do? Absolutely. Was it therapeutic to do? Did it change my state of mind? Yeah, 100%. Not that I was in a bad place. I was in a great place, great day. It just shifted me into a whole different— it opened up a whole new world. And I'm actually fired up. I could finish this and go on and do some other creative stuff tonight if I wanted. But you could also slow it down. If you want to get your energy out for the day, you can slow things down, put some peaceful music on. All right, cool. So I like that black marker around the edge, it just pops the shape out a little bit on there. All right, I'm gonna see if there's any final questions or comments and we're gonna wrap up for tonight. Uh, Noel says, I think sharing the playlist is a great idea. Everyone loves music and it can help inspire people. Others and others while they sketch. Yes, 100%. I love, love that. Uh, probably won't listen to it while you're live so I can hear you better, but when you're on your own, it would be helpful to have some cool tunes to sketch to. I agree with you. Um, I love the feedback. Definitely going to process it, and I think I'm going to put it out there. And I also love that, um, if you guys listen to the playlist I put out, you can kind of get in my brain a little bit more. And see how that music is driving what I'm doing. Um, that's what the Inkspired Life is about, giving you guys an inside peek into my creative mindset. It's not only about the tools we use, um, not only about the techniques we use, but a lot about the creative mindset. And I hope I'm sharing that with you guys. I hope you enjoy these sneak peeks of architectural sketching and urban sketching. And I really appreciate you watching. This is so fun for me. Yeah, you guys are amazing. So if you're watching the replay, feel free to leave questions and comments. I'll come back and, and, uh, look at them. If you're watching this on YouTube and you like what you're seeing, I would love for you to subscribe and give me a thumbs up. It does help to share this. I just want to be able to spread positivity through creativity. As best as I can. All right guys, I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with the Inkspired Life. Remember, you too can sketch architecture one line at a time. Until we sketch again, which will be really soon, um, you may see me live streaming Sunday a little bit from Central Park. I'm going to be there, you know, participating in a workshop where we're sketching a bridge, um, in the amazing, amazing location of Central Park. So if I have time, I'll maybe do a quick live stream from there. All right, take care. Appreciate y'all. Have a great, great night. Keep using your creativity for positivity.