LIVE SKETCHING: Loose Lines & No Apologies

Hey, um, I think I'm live. Hey there, happy, um, Sunday, July 12th, 2026. It is 9:38 PM. Oh man, I'm on late here, but that's awesome. You know what, because I just wanted to come on for a few minutes, say hello, and do some sketching. So, um I hope you're having a really, really awesome day wherever you are. So just join me for a few. We're gonna do some sketching. I don't know what I'm gonna sketch yet tonight. Um, do a quick little show and tell of some of the things I've been working on, and we'll kind of take it from there. So feel free to, uh, say hello in the chat if you're watching live. Um, yeah, just want to start the Instagram stream. There we go. So if you don't know who I am, my name is Jason Nicholas Nicholas. I'm an architect, I'm a high school teacher. I love sketching architecture. I just love sketching in general. And mostly what I do are buildings because of my architecture background. Here's an example of something we did on the last livestream. And this is my Lochbie folio. Love using this. But someone asked if I can sketch the Eiffel Tower, so we just, you know, a little challenge is awesome for stretching and growing and trying things. So we did a quick Eiffel Tower sketch, which was a lot of fun. All right, let me zoom in a little bit on screen, and I got some music going in my ears here. Ah, perfect. All right, cool. So here, let me talk about what I've been working on, um, lately. So I have been using these— I, I love these sketchbooks. They're by a company called Ugly Books. Um, I have a few here. You can see I actually just stocked up on different size ones, so I'm really curious to give the 8x5¾ format a try. I've been using the 4x5¾, which is a really cool size as well. And then these big— it's called ugly pads— just big sheets of their paper. So that'll be so much fun to use. Um, here's some of the things I've been sketching. So, uh, here was a quick kind of Empire State Building inspired sketch, or inkspired. And looking for my pen. So I've been using white gel pens like crazy in these books. I love the way the white gel pens show up on this colored paper. So you can see this is actually red. This color is a yellowish paper in here. And that's what makes ugly books really cool to me, is the different colored paper, and the pages don't bleed through. So It's great for these, for gel pens, Sharpies. I use Creative Markers in them as well. Here's some kind of mixed media sketches in here, and again, they don't bleed through. So just really nice thick paper, highly recommended. Check out, um, go to my website inspiredlife.com/tools, or in the description, um, you can go to Ugly Books and use a discount link there, uh, for my website. Anyway, so this summer I'm working on like landscaping, landscape sketches. I'm not used to them, I don't really do them that much, so I'm stretching my creative comfort zone, which is a great way to grow and just be experimental. And I'm not— don't have any expectations other than to just sketch trees, rocks, landscapes. And here's some of the things I've been kind of quickly sketching. These were actually on site, so it was a place I like to go to, a park. This is a sketch I kind of was inspired by what I saw around me outdoors. And here's another one I did, um, same day as well. And again, I just like the colors. I like the white and the red. It looks kind of fun on there. So when I'm sketching these landscapes, the idea is it's training my brain in different ways and it's training me to see the world in different ways, the outdoor world. So I'm trying to translate what I'm seeing into different kind of lines or scribbles or textures. So you can see I'm kind of doing some scratchy leaf kind of shapes here. We have a pathway here, some grasses growing up. Growing up, yes, they're growing up, growing along the side of the pathway there. So these landscape sketches are, I'm trying to take my style and figure out how I can use that to translate into the natural world, you know, as compared to buildings. I want to see with any other landscapes in here. Not in that one. I think in this one I might have some. Eh, nope, I haven't used that one yet. Oh, this one here. Um, here's one I did today. So I'm finding that I'm kind of doing these diagonal hatch lines to indicate trees. And this is a rock here. Again, we have some of those kind of grasses growing, just kind of quick lines or flicks of my wrist here to get those lines there. I tried to do this as a single line drawing or a continuous line. Not 100%, but a lot of it was one line. And when I sketch with one line, it just keeps things looser for me. So that's what we did today. What else do we have? And here's another landscape. This is the same park I showed you in the red sketchbook, um, just a different location there. This is what I call the thinking tree. I love this tree, and there's a bench under it, um, so I call that the thinking tree. So cool. And some more kind of nature things. So yeah, I'm pushing myself. So don't be afraid to challenge yourself creatively and try sketching or painting, um, photographing, whatever you do. Try different subjects, different topics. So let's get something tonight. I— what do I want to sketch? I don't know. Um, we'll just start. You know what, we're not going to sketch anything in particular. I'm just going to throw down some lines on paper. Well, she's just doing one of these books. We'll go with the red one here. And then this week I'm going to get back to sketching in here, which is my NYC calendar sketchbook. So I want to turn these into a calendar for these NYC-inspired abstract sketches. So these are kind of— these have been a lot of fun to do. I love the Grand Central terminal ones. Here's— pretty cool. So yeah, so I'll get back to these, these sketches on this week. We'll continue bringing this book further along. I have more than enough to do a calendar, but I want to fill this book up with more of these types of sketches. Cool. All right, I'm just gonna You know what, actually, uh, I changed my mind. I'm gonna break out— let's break out one of these, one of these large sheets of paper that I literally just got the other day. So let's play around on this and see what happens. First of all, I gotta open this up. Um, Ugly Books has also been really cool. They, they have— I'll actually show you— they have donated and sponsored some sketchbooks for the workshop I'm teaching in Brooklyn on August 1st. So if you signed up for that, um, August 1st, Brooklyn at Stationery Fest, you can come sketch with me, loose style architecture. Um, there's a link in the chat if there's still some seats available, but Ugly Books is really awesome and they donated sketchbooks I'm going to be giving out. So how cool is that? Love, love, love that. Um, that's going to be so fun. I know it sounds like a commercial, but I only talk about or promote products I really love using. All right, let's cut this thing open here. All right, cool. Uh, this is— guys, this is live here. I have not opened this up. I haven't used these large size sheets of paper yet. Um, these should be the colors in here, so let's check this out together. There we go. All right, so this is cool. So actually, I didn't even realize, so it has a glued edge, which is awesome. So these are all kind of stuck together, which is cool. Um, and I also like that I can flip the COVID down, right? So we can use the COVID kind of hide it there. Let's look at some of the colors. We got kind of that beige color, we got a nice orange color here as well. I think if I remember online, they called this like the Farm Series, the Farm Series. Color. I like the green. What else do we have in here? There should be a red and a black. Got the red, and then, uh, the last one we have black. Pretty cool, right? So yeah, so let's, uh, you know, let's sketch on— let's do, I don't know, We'll just start with the— we'll break out this page right here. And what should we sketch? You know what I'm going to do? Let's do a Grand Central Terminal inspired sketch tonight. I haven't sketched GCT in a while. One of my most favorite, favorite places to sketch in New York City, Grand Central Terminal. And we're just going to open this up. I always like to have a little reference image. Um, we'll just open this up and we'll use one of my sketches in here as a reference. So we got this view here, or we can grab— we'll do this one too. Here's kind of more iconic view inside GCT. Feel free to say hello, ask me questions if you're watching. It's always great to interact with with you. I always appreciate that. All right, all right, cool. And I think we're gonna stick with the white gel pen for now. And I'm gonna— this is gonna be a quick sketch. 9:50, I'm gonna wrap this up by 10 o'clock. So let's see, we can get done in 10 minutes. I'm just going back to my music here. And I wish I could play it for you guys, but I can't because I would get copyrighted. So, I'm just listening to my Spotify playlist. If you ever want to follow along with me, I think I have this public, this list. You can always check out my playlist here, The Inspired Life. Just kind of see the stuff I'm listening to. Let's see. I'm sorry, I'm just trying to find a— there we are. Cool. All right, let's do it. Hopefully you guys can see that okay. We'll see how the white pen shows up on this paper. And we'll just do— and this is going to be just a GCT-inspired sketch. GCT is Grand Central Terminal. Kind of loosey-goosey. I must— let me grab another, uh, I kind of like this brand. So this is Gelly Roll white gel pens. They're cool, they work, they're kind of wonky. I like them, but they're— I don't find them consistent with the ink coming out. So let me switch to this one. This, this brand seems to be a little more consistent. So you can see right there, the kind of more, uh, darker white color there. All right, cool. So we're just going to block this out, and we're actually— I'm going to— we'll throw down some creative markers too. We'll just have fun with color on this sketch tonight. Grand Central Terminal is just such a It's an architectural masterpiece. The scale inside this building is insane. It's— I'll throw some people on the sketch. You can get a sense of how huge the space really is. So we'll throw some people down at the bottom here, maybe like right here. So imagine those are like some people kind of hanging out, right? So you can get a sense of the scale. I might be over-exaggerating, but it's a pretty, pretty dang tall space. All right, so we got a kind of a basic rough outline. Let's throw down some color on here. I am, I am itching to see how purple looks on this paper. Um, I'm itching to see, of course, how my favorite color looks on here, this turquoise. Let's start on some purple. And actually, I'm gonna— I'll come back now over this and we'll throw some white lines on top. I'm really liking the way the purple pops out against the background on this. That pops out on, uh, against the— I don't know what color you call this, like a taupe color, paper bag color, brown. Is it taupe? What color is taupe? And can you spell that? How do you spell taupe? Is it top? All right, cool. So I like throwing the purple down and then coming back on top of it with the white, um, kind of the hatch lines there really pop out more. All right, let's throw down some of this. Yeah. All right, cool. Yeah, this is fun. Just kind of, like I said, I'm just kind of playing around with this paper. First time testing it out. Uh, first time using this color. It's a little bit more white on here. Let's break out some other pens or markers and we'll wrap up. All right, cool. I think that was a kind of a fun quick— I'm over by 3 minutes, but it's a quick sketch of Inspired by Grand Central Terminal on this cool Ugly Books paper. This is what I'm using tonight, Ugly Pads it's called. Check it out, uh, go to my website inspiredlife.com/tools, you'll see links there. Um, check it out. I'm liking, really liking this. Let me throw some railings on here, some balusters, just to give the idea we have a railing up here. There we go. I just saw— thought of one thing I wanted to add here. Very cool. Let's just kind of write on here what it is. Trying to get better at signing. —or just writing dates on sketches I do so I remember. So we'll just put, uh, GCT. Boom. And at least the year is okay. So 2026. There we go. All right, so this was a quick, uh, Grand Central Terminal-inspired sketch tonight on this UglyPads paper. Check it out, good stuff. Until we meet again, sketch boldly, live creatively, and embrace Imperfection.