Artist Jason Nicholas sketches the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort live, starting with bold lines at the skyline and working down. He uses watercolor and colored pencils to capture the building's teal color, emphasizes reflecting surfaces in his work, and demonstrates how thumbnail sketches help him plan details like the dolphin fountain.
Good morning. Hope you're having an amazing day. I just wanted to bring you along for a minute with me, so join me as I take a look here at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort. And I'm out here sketching just for a few minutes before I head off to some other activities today. I wanted to give some pro tips about sketching architecture. So you can see I did a real, real quick sketch here. And just in my mindset, how am I sketching this? So this building, it's pretty obvious what the main shape is, right? If I'm looking here, that triangle. So when I'm looking at architecture, um, I usually start with big shapes and bold lines. And also I like to start where the building meets the skyline. So in this case, I did start with the triangle shape, and then I kind of followed the edge of the, um, building where it touches the blue sky. And because that gives me a definition of line, right, that I could trace the— that line work where the building meets the sky, and that's just a great place to start the building. I also typically will start my sketches from the top down. And here's kind of a secret: I don't always have the building go all the way down to the ground. I'll stop it here. If you look at this sketch here, like, I intentionally stopped the building before it touches the ground. I like the look. I like the kind of unfinished look of sketches. But there are times where I'll do the opposite. I'll work from the ground up, or I'll focus on details. In this case, I was just trying to get an overall shape, mostly of kind of here in this section. There is a really cool shell fountain up there, and of course the dolphin. So I have to work on my animals. So it's a caricature of a dolphin. So I, I've sketched it a few times. I'm not really quite thrilled with the way it's coming out, but I'm going to keep practicing and having fun with it. And then down here you can see the really cool entry fountain. Sorry if my hand's shaking a little bit, I'm out here without a gimbal. And then you can see some more shells down there. If I pan to the right, another building that's really cool and fun to sketch is right here. So if anybody can guess the name of that, let me know in the comments. What the name of this building is. I will give it away in a minute. But, um, it's a really interesting area. This is my favorite place to be sketching at Walt Disney World Resort, so far, so far. It could change. A question I have been getting about this is the colors of the building. My style is to never really capture exactly what I'm seeing, as you know if you've seen my stuff. In this case, there is a color I do want to try to capture, and I love the kind of teal aqua-ish color, which I don't know the exact name of it. So when I try to capture that, if I am using watercolor, I'll use a— I'll use an aqua, or sorry, there's a turquoise watercolor paints. If I'm using my colored pencils, I like to use my light aqua. Um, yesterday I actually tried using some watercolor pencils. I don't know the exact name of the color. Um, it came out really cool. So, and then the rest of the colors, honestly, I haven't really tried to capture them, so Here you go. Here's another cool thing about this view is I love the reflection. So when sketching this, I'll probably do a couple sketches, small thumbnail type sketches, and I'll try to show the reflection of the building. It's actually really cool. I gotta get a picture of that one. So if you're watching, thank you so much. I can't read the comments right now. I'll check back in later. Give it a thumbs up if you like this kind of video with some pro tips about architectural sketching. And I do have to give a shout out to Lochbie. So I have my Lochbie field journal and I always take it with me whether I'm writing notes or urban sketching. It's my go-to tool. I know I plug it all the time. That's because I love this dang thing. It's pretty amazing. All right, one more look around and I'm going to head out. I have some other places we're going to head to today. One of these days maybe we'll go inside and take a peek inside of— give you— show you a bit inside there as well. What else? Let's look at the dolphin up there. The good thing about the dolphin is like it's a caricature, so I should be able to kind of sketch that. If it was a real dolphin fish, yeah. If anybody remembers the giraffe sketch from a couple years ago, you know me and animals. Something I need to work on. All right, I could, I could literally sit here the entire day, um, the entire day, no problem. I'll kind of just walk back this way if you want to hang out. Just join me for a few steps here. Um, this building is interesting over here. This part of the building almost has like a latticework on it, which is kind of fun. All right guys, I'm going to wrap up. Thank you so much for watching. Please give it a like. Thumbs up, subscribe, share, all that fun stuff, because I just want to keep paying it forward using my creativity for positivity. Uh, it's kind of a personal mission, and I really appreciate your support and, and just following along. You are awesome. Get a pen out, get some paper out, and sketch anything, whether it's architecture or not. It doesn't matter. Just put pen to paper, let stuff happen. All right, take care. Have an amazing, amazing day. I'm going to find the off button. It's probably going to look weird on the camera. I'm probably going to— well, yeah, you'll see. I got to get a gimbal. All right, how do I end this stream? Oh, I see a big X in the corner. Let's X out. See you guys. Peace. Live creatively. Says, are you sure you want to stop streaming? Yes.
