Loose Style Architectural Sketching - DUMBO - Manhattan Bridge
In this October 2023 live stream, architect and educator Jason Nicholas guides viewers through a relaxed, "loose style" sketching session focused on the iconic Manhattan Bridge view from DUMBO, Brooklyn. He begins by explaining his personal spin on Inktober and Archtober, then demonstrates sketching the scene first on a tiny 3 × 5 in. index card using a Pilot Precise Pen, and subsequently on an 8 × 8 in. sheet with a Sharpie. Throughout the session he shares his material preferences (Pilot pens, Sharpies, Prismacolor colored pencils, highlighters), drawing techniques (quick gestural lines, wonky/loose strokes, hatching, layering, breaking complex architecture into simple shapes), and his creative mindset (sketch without over‑thinking, using drawing as mindfulness and a journal‑like practice). He interacts heavily with the live chat, greeting regular viewers, mentioning a bridge‑sketching workshop he may attend, recounting a student’s success after following his advice, and discussing his nightly journaling habit (gratitude, win, challenge, strategy). The stream ends with a brief color‑addition phase (neon pink, aqua, highlighter) and reflections on framing the finished work, future Inklings reunion plans, and a closing encouragement to use creativity positively.
Chapters
Hey everybody, hope you're doing awesome on, uh, this— what is it, Thursday night? Hope you're doing great. Let me know if you can hear me okay. I haven't changed— I've changed microphones. One was working, now it doesn't work with the new Mac update, blah blah blah. But we're not here to talk tech issues, we're here to do some sketching tonight. Um, yeah, so I'm just getting settled in here. I can't hear my music, but I'm going to turn up my volume. Maybe, maybe I actually have to hit play. That would work. Hey, Tim's in the house. Thank you, Tim. So hope you guys are doing well. Um, so this is October, right? And October is also has a really cool thing that's called Inktober. You can go online and Google it. There are prompts for different things to sketch every day. Of the month, but I'm kind of doing something different. There's another thing called Archtober. You can sketch architecture stuff. I'm just doing my own spin and I'm just going to be sketching stuff I love sketching, and that's New York City-inspired sketching. And I thought I'd do something really fun tonight and sketch on a 3x5 index card. So let's do that. Hope you guys are doing well. I see Tim, awesome to see you. And Karen, great to see you too. Wow, this is so fun. Let me just get rid of that and we'll— I have a 10-minute timer, but I'm not gonna do that. We're gonna— I'm not gonna use a timer tonight. We're just gonna have fun and sketch. All right, cool. So 3x5 index card, um, I'm gonna bring an image on screen. This is my inspo for tonight. So this is a classic iconic view. You see this photograph, like, it's so popular. This is in Dumbo, and this is a view of the Manhattan Bridge. That's really— it's so cool the way it's framed looking down the street between the buildings. So I thought we'd try to sketch this kind of quick and loose, and I'm actually going to start with my Pilot Precise Pen. You guys know I usually start with my Sharpie, but you know what, I'm feeling living on the edge. I'm going with a different pen. This is the pen that I probably have sketched the most with, the Pilot pens, um, way back since college, definitely way back since I started my architecture career. So let's do it, guys. Let me know if you have any questions. Let me know where you're watching from. I'm gonna I'm going to zoom in a little bit because this is a small sheet of paper and I'm going to scale down the photo. All right, cool. So if you're just joining me, I don't sketch like realistic images. I'm not trying to copy the photograph. It's just there to inspire me. And this is going to be fun. Hopefully my hand's not taking up too much of this image because the index card is so small. We'll give it a try. All right, so I'm actually going to start with the buildings on the side and just kind of frame this perspective view. And I think this pen— whoa, you started off with a dead pen. So we got another one right here. There we go, cool. So we're gonna have those buildings there. On the other side, we have another building kind of comes up like this. I just want to kind of just create a frame of perspective, you looking towards the Manhattan Bridge. Um, I love this scene. I've only actually seen this in person once, and it's actually breathtaking in person. It's just so amazing, uh, you can't believe it's real. All right, here's the bridge. Let's sketch it. I'm definitely challenging myself sketching on a small format, but sketching on a small format is going to challenge me just to keep it simpler and not as much detail. The iconic things I see when I look at this bridge structure, the arch here, the iconic X kind of cross bracing we have going on. So we have some cross bracing like that, right? And here's the bridge road. It's kind of doing something like that. It gets interrupted here. The bridge is coming down, bridge is coming down there. I'm going to do some shading or hatching to indicate shading. Let's just draw that across for now. Cool. And it'll start taking shape as I add more to it. This actually will continue through here. I'm going to add— just do some shading at the bottom of the bridge. Here's under the roadway there. Another iconic thing I see here, we have kind of these finials at the top, these round pieces kind of finish the top off there. And then we have our cables, right? So we just have some cables kind of coming off that way. We got some going back this way as well. We got some verticals here. It's a really, really small sketch. I might, I might stay on a little longer and do a bigger version as well. And the buildings in the foreground, I'm actually just going to, I'm just going to shade them. I'm not even going to draw any windows or anything. Very cool. I see Linda H is in the house. Linda H, I hope you're doing well. It's always great to see you pop on. Dirk G, hey, hello from Germany. Hello, Dirk G, how are you? Great to see you. Dirk G, I think I recognize your name. Um, from Sifat's show. Let me know if that's where I've seen your name from. If so, that's awesome. Thank you for joining, subscribing. Very cool. So that's just a real quick small sketch of this. Let's do a bigger one. Let's see what happens. Very, very cool. All right. So this is actually an 8x8 piece of paper here. I'm going to sketch the same thing and I'm actually going to break out the Sharpie for this one. And let me just see, sometimes my Sharpies will get dried out quick. We'll start with this one and we'll see how it goes. Dirk G says yes, so it is. That is awesome, very, very cool, man. Well, thank you for watching. So Dirk definitely knows this scene. We both watch the New York walking show, a live streamer named Sifat, and he livestreams from New York City, and he is— he's just awesome, and he inspires me all the time, and he's been here definitely on his walking, his walks. Really cool. So I have a little bit more space on this one. You can see my Sharpie is kind of drying out and that's okay. I'm going to keep sketching with it. I might grab another one and go over some of the lines in a few minutes or so. So there, there is a slight chance I actually might be back in this area on this upcoming Sunday. I have to see if it's going to work out with timing, but there's a sketching workshop in this area that I might sign up for. It's actually a bridge sketching workshop, so I know it would be right up my alley because I love sketching bridges. So it'd be so cool if I can get back out there and take more pictures, do some sketching, but we'll see how it goes. Just going to bring this line down here. I'm going to continue the bridge structure down. There's actually another arch underneath here. Somewhere here we have an arch and I'm going to add some hatch lines to give it some more depth. Right now it's looking kind of flat. And then over here we do have buildings kind of flanking the side framing. So we'll just, just loosely sketch those in because I don't— it's not really about these buildings. It's about the bridge. So we kind of have that edge right there happening. Bridget says it's absolutely fascinating. That's cool. I could, I could sketch all day, guys. I just It's my thing. It's my zen. Sketching just— it just does really cool things for mindfulness for me. Helps me change my state of thinking. It fuels my creativity. It's just fun. And now let's just— let's draw in these. This is our X bracing here, kind of cross bracing we have going on. Right. We have some more here as well. And notice my lines are very loose, very wonky. I'm sketching this fast. That's, that's how I roll. That's kind of— that's my style. I have the photograph, you know, if I, I don't need to sketch this realistically because I have the picture I could look at. Let's see, we got kind of this line here across there, and then we have kind of our roadway up there. We have a structure that does this kind of these triangle shapes happening. So in my brain, I'm just trying to break down what I see into shapes, and that helps me sketch architecture. Sometimes you look at architecture, it's so complicated. Just break it down into basic shapes. That's kind of one of the ways I tackle these. Hey, I see, um, is that Kat? Kat is in the house! OMG, holy cow, it is so great to see you! It's been way, way too long. Kat is, uh, she's awesome. Kat's over on Facebook right now and she goes— she and I go way back. Back to the original Inkling days when I first started kind of live streaming with my sketches and we did some workshops together. It is so awesome to see you and Kat is an amazing creative soul. She really has— she's inspired me so much over these past few years. It's so great to see you. Love it. And then we have our vertical cables coming down. I'm just going to do them kind of light in here. It's about kind of just looking at it, adding layers. It's kind of roughed out now. And I'm going to come in and let's— I'm going to start adding some hatch lines just to create some shadows. First, I'm going to grab a drink of tea here. Linda says, hello, Dirk. This is great. I love that you guys are watching. Hmm. Karen goes way back to, to the original Inklings. All right, here's what we— here's what I'm going to do. Zoom in a little bit. I want to create some depth here, right? So all I'm going to do is I'm going to do some hatch lines. H-A-T-C-H. It's more like scribbling. I'm literally kind of scribbling in there just to create a sense of depth. We'll do the same thing over here. Usually I would do this faster and talk less. So, I'm thinking a little too much. When I think and sketch, I don't get the flow. I know it sounds weird, but I like to sketch without thinking. When I find I'm slowing down and thinking about what I'm doing, I break my rhythm, which is strange because I just kind of go— I like to go with my gut when I'm sketching, whether I'm adding color or lines, just kind of go with it. And I actually had one of my students today in my architecture class I have my architecture students doing weekly sketchbook assignments, and he said something really cool to me today. He showed me his sketch this week and he's like, I did something different this week, Mr. Nick. They call me Mr. Nick, which I love. I'm like, yeah, what did you do? He's like, I took your advice. I'm like, I was so excited about that. I'm like, okay, what was my advice? He said, don't think too much, just draw it. And he, he did it and it came out really great because he— before he was thinking, because he's drawing a building, it has to be very precise and technical. But the idea of sketching is quick, loose, capturing the idea of what you're looking at. And I was so happy that it actually worked, worked for him. So that was, that was a cool, cool moment today. Every day I try to think of a journal. I pretty much journal every night and I write down 3 things. One thing is what am I grateful for today. The other thing I write down in my journal is what was one of my wins of the day. And the other thing I write down is what was a challenge I had today And how might I approach that challenge next time? What kind of strategy or solution? So this one's going down in the win column for today. So really cool stuff. So I'm just shading in here. I'm just going to make— give a little bit of depth here happening. And you can see just by adding these lines, it's kind of taking more of a little bit of a form and shape. We'll just do some in here as well. Another thing I do for loose style sketching is you'll probably notice I'm going back over lines many times and not exactly tracing them. But for me, that kind of keeps the loose look I like. Another word for loose is wonky. I like the wonkiness. We're going to add some depth on this side as well. And this pen is actually drying out, so I'm pushing really hard on the paper. Probably hear it. We have some vertical kind of guide rails, um, along the guardrail here, some vertical pieces. Pretty cool, right? And way, way in the distance, I don't know if you can see in the photograph. I'll make the photo bigger. Can you guys see this here? All the way— I don't think you can see my cursor, but all the way between the, um, on the lower arch, framed within the lower arch, is Actually, the Empire State Building is right back in here. I'm gonna ever so lightly just kind of get the spire, the top part of the Empire State Building here. If I go back here someday, I'm gonna try to take more pictures in this area. It's always packed with people, so I'm gonna— I'll be there early in the morning, so hopefully it won't be as busy. So way back in here is the Empire State Building. I'm just gonna do this. So there's the Empire State Building. Oops, there we are. Cool. Let me go through the comments and catch up with you guys. I may have missed some people. KP says, I found where you all are hanging. Hey, thank you for joining us on the YouTube side. D-Ray, is you D-Ray in the house? D-Ray, awesome to see you as well. I love that you guys are here. Arrow Set's here. Here, man. There's a party in the house. I should pop on this time more often. Nice to see you, Arissette. Love this. D-Ray, it's been a while. Hope all is well. I love what Cat says here. Can I put this on screen? Let me see if I can do this. Add to broadcast. Inking without thinking. That, that is a t-shirt right there. What do you think? Should I make that into a t-shirt? So I like this bridge. I'm actually just going to kind of darken the outline of it and I'm going to be bold and brave and I'm going to take— we're going to take the Sharpie here. What the heck? Why not? It's Inktober. Let's use ink. So this Sharpie has a much wider point. So we're gonna— when people say Sharpies, this is probably the Sharpie that comes to mind. So we're going to outline the edge, the bridge here. That's so cool. Let me close that. That's fun. I could put stuff on screen. Um, Mr. Nick, don't think too much. Yes, D-Ray, I always— I'm D-Ray. I've missed you. D-Ray always captures what I say in words. I love I love that. Do you write in your journal every day? Um, I'm not going to say every day, that's, that's probably a lie. I would say 5 days out of 7 is probably my average. So I would say yeah, every night. I do it every night before I go to bed. And again, I just write down those 3 things: what am I grateful for, what was my win of the day, and what was my challenge of the day. I guess 4 things. My challenge of the day and what kind of strategy or solution can I do the next time a challenge comes up. So yeah, I find it really helpful to do that. All right, so I'm darkening this up. I'm just living on the edge here a little bit because I really want this shape of this, the Manhattan Bridge, to pop out. You know, kind of darken this edge here a little bit. I think I'm going to— I want to hatch the bottom of the bridge a little bit more just to give it a little more depth to it. There we go. And there's actually a little bit of shadow under here as well. I, I'm actually really liking the way this one turned out. It's looking pretty cool. Let's pull out kind of this edge here. Notice when I'm holding the Sharpie, I'm actually holding it towards the end cuz I want it to be looser when I'm sketching. I have more wiggle room, right? It's wiggling. If I hold it down here, I feel like I have to draw really precise. So I'm kind of holding it further towards the end because I want looser looking lines. This kind of comes here. We'll do this, pull this out like that. Maybe I'll pull out that arch. I think I definitely want to pull this arch out to a little bit. Like that. So just by adding that Sharpie, it really helped that pop out, right? I'm not even going to do anything with these buildings here on the side. I'm just going to leave them as outlines. Do I want to do this here? No, actually, I know— do I? No, I don't want to. I was going to use this thicker Sharpie to hatch, but I kind of like the way that looks. I don't want to color this in solid here. I could take my marker and color this in solid black, but I like the scribbly, loose look and the kind of white space you see between the hatch lines here. So that's the reason I kind of decided not to use this and color in there. I'm going to leave it very loose and sketchy looking. And the same thing with all these other hatch lines here. Cool. Awesome. Awesome. Let me see if there's any questions or comments. I'm going to wrap up in a minute or two. Ba-bum-bum. All good here. You guys are saying hello. I love that. Linda says, totally a t-shirt. Um, that's so funny. Oh no, end of COVID Ah, Eros said, I'm so sorry. I hope you're, uh, hope you're feeling better now. That stinks about the COVID Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. Hope you're on the road to recovery, for sure. All right guys, I think this one is done. I like— I kind of like where it ended up. So this was our quick small one just to kind of loosen up a little bit, and then we have the bigger one. I definitely like the 8-inch by 8-inch. Pretty nice piece. This would look cool framed. Let me see if I have my frames here. I have I do. I have some frames. They're too small, but it's all right. So if we were to kind of crop this out in a frame, just maybe this piece could look really cool. I kind of like it off-centered a little bit. So maybe if it was like this, pretty neat looking. I'm going to see if I have a black— I don't have a black frame. No, I don't have a smaller white frame here. Let's see this. No, I don't like that. I like, I like the verticality of this size frame. So something like this could look kind of cool. Yeah, I like that. Hey, Karen says nice. Thank you, Karen. Karen, you're nice too. "That thick outline is so good, it makes it pop right out." Yeah, thank you. So that's— I switched to the Sharpie here, the thicker Sharpie. I could make it darker, but I don't want to overdo it. Actually, I'm going to lie. I feel like this edge could be a little darker. There we go. I don't want to get too cray cray, but Good, I'm glad that worked. Thinking without thinking, I like it. Dirk says thank you very much, I must say bye. No worries, it's 2:15 AM. Dirk, thank you from— for, uh, tuning in from Germany. That is so cool. I'd love to see you back again. Good night, Dirk. I appreciate your time. That's so cool. Um, we're going overseas. Looks great, Jason. Love The little one also. Oh, thank you, Linda. Yeah, the little one's cool. It's just a warm-up one, very different, right? I'll put them next to each other. Actually, let's play around with this. I'm gonna add— I'm gonna play with the small one for a sec. Let's zoom in. What the heck, we're gonna, um, I know it's Inktober, but what the heck, let's use— break out some of the pink. You guys know I love to throw pops of this neon pink in place as right? So I just feel like coloring this one a little bit. Why not, right? Let's make it pop. And I have my other favorite color pencil color, the light aqua, is here as well. Now the man's getting crazy. Gotta live on the edge, right? I actually like this color here. I like where the pink and the aqua are mixing. Again, it's a cool purplish color happening. That's fun. And I feel like breaking out a highlighter. Let's break out— I don't think you guys have seen me use the highlighter in a while, so let's just do some highlighting. Let's actually highlight kind of the sky area. Oh, I just noticed I didn't put the arch down here on the bottom. All right, now the arch is there. This is kind of cool, just adding that yellow. There you go, kind of makes the bridge pop out a little bit. Awesome. Let's see, the little one needs some color. Yeah, Linda, that's so funny. I don't know if you said that before or after, we were thinking the same thing. KP says good morning, Dirk G. Good night, take care, Dirk. Good to see you, good to see you. He's going in for the color pink. Yes, and aqua and highlighter. Come on, you know, you know it wouldn't be me if I didn't start getting a little cray cray on this. Awesome. I am, I am not gonna throw a color on this one. I kind of like this one black and white, put them next to each other. Cool. Hey, awesome guys, thank you so much for watching. It's now 8:21 PM. This young man— at least I like to think I'm young— um, this young man has— I have school tomorrow. I have a busy, busy day at school tomorrow. Actually, every day is a busy, busy day at school. But yeah, I want to get to bed early, um, get a good night's sleep. All that fun stuff. I would show you my other sketch, Inktober sketch. I did the Brooklyn Bridge last time, but I actually have that in sketchbook in school, so I can't show you that one right now. All right, guys, you're awesome. Linda says, looks awesome now. Yeah, do you guys like this little one? Do you like the color on there? I think the color actually made a big difference. Definitely more whimsical. I'm going to pop these buildings out a little bit more. I think the color really helps to highlight the— no pun intended— but to highlight where the bridge is. The only thing about colored pencil, if you're going to use colored pencil and do— if you're going to do mixed media, these are just regular colored pencils, Prismacolor. I love using— this is my favorite colored pencil brand. Um, I like to throw the colored pencil down usually towards the end because if I want to go back and ink over it, you can't really It doesn't really take the ink that well because it's wax, right? So I'll typically throw the color pencil on towards the end. You could tell I'm having so much fun. I'm still sketching here. I think I do that all the time. I always say I'm going to wrap up and then another 45 hours goes by and I'm still sketching. All right. Cool. Yeah, there we go. So that's the little sketch. I actually like it. I actually like it a lot too with the color. That made a huge, huge difference on this one, didn't it? It's more fun. It has more energy to it. And that's one of the things I love about New York City is the energy. And it also has the quiet places like Central Park. It's a really, really awesome place. Hey, Jody's in the house. Jody says, love the colors. Awesome, thank you, Jody, that's so cool. Hey, Tim says, nice to see you, dude. Tim, awesome to see you. Tim and I go way, way back to our improv days. We'll have to catch up one of these days, that would be so fun. Thank you for watching, Tim, appreciate it. Yeah, I'm gonna wrap up. Love the blast of color, good to catch you guys. Arissette, feel better. Hang in there. Thank you for watching, Karen. Awesome to see you. I appreciate— always appreciate you watching, Jody. Great to see you as well. And if I missed anybody else— oh, D-Ray, D-Ray, you're— it was great seeing you. And Linda H. Cat, of course. I know I say this all the time, but we need to have our Inklings reunion. That would be so cool. I know I've said it like 10 times and I have never set it up. Um, but yeah, we should do that. Cat, thank you, I am blushing. Ah, well, it's true, Cat is really— I'm just gonna give Cat a quick shout out. Cat has made these incredible, um, dollhouses, these miniatures. Amazing. That's all I'm gonna say. Cool stuff. All right guys, take care. I appreciate you all so, so much. Thank you for watching. Thank you for sharing. Hey, Janice just popped in! Janice, good to see you. Hope you're doing well. I'll say hi to the fam. You got it. You caught me live, Janice. I love that. I am definitely live. It's me here, live in the flesh. No, I'm not in zombie mode today, but I'm actually on my way out. But Janice, I'm so glad you popped in, guys. Hey, keep, uh, paying it forward. I like to say, you know, use your creativity for positivity. Put good out there in the world, even if it's a simple nod hello to someone or a silent blessing. It all goes somewhere. It all goes in a good direction. This is great music for wrapping up because I'm being serious, kind of, and the music's fun. All right, guys, take care. I'll see you real soon. Peace and live creatively. I definitely have to work on my outro. D-Ray, I know where the button is. I'm going for it right now. Take care, guys. I'll be on, uh, yes to Inkling reunion. Sounds great. I'll put something together. Definitely. Take care, guys. Have a great, great night. Peace and live creatively.
