Monday Night Sketch and Chill

It. Hey. Happy Monday, February 2, 2026. Hope you're having a great day. I'm Jason with the inspired life where I love sketching. I love sketching, especially architecture. I just love the built environment. Buildings. Buildings can really do a lot for us. They can change how we feel. Buildings protect us, right? Give us shelter. There are landmarks, they have character, they add to the story, the scenery really, you know, just a lot of power in a building. It could be a simple shelter, you know, made out of sticks and, and leaves or a sophisticated multi billion dollar skyscraper. Right. Think about how those two different types of buildings really make you feel different in different ways. And that's one of the reasons I love, I love sketching. Sketching can do the same thing for me. It can really change my state of being. I could be in a bad mood and sketching could change it. I could be really, really hyper and need to wind down for the day and sketching could change that as well. And it's also just a way for me to capture a feeling, a time, a moment in time, the energy of a place and yeah, so I guess that's kind of why I love buildings and architecture and sketching. It just all kind of relates together for me. So what I want to do tonight is a little bit different format. Usually I just kind of go right in and sketch something, but I want to do just like a mini kind of class. Mini class. We'll talk about a few of the reasons. Maybe if you like sketching or art and you haven't done it in a while, I'm going to talk about three maybe barriers that have been stopping you from getting into that kind of creative groove. And then I'll talk about maybe a quick exercise or two that we can kind of help to get back into the rhythm of being creative. So it's gonna be a little bit of me chatting, a little bit of me sketching. So stay tuned, bear with me. Thanks for joining me on tonight's journey. It'll be a short stream too. I'm going to try to keep it to a half hour, so feel free to leave questions and comments. I'll be checking in the comments, you know, here and there as we kind of switch segments. All I have tonight and if you want to join with me when I do, we're gonna do maybe a quick 5 minute to 10 minute exercise in a little bit. Just grab a piece of paper and it doesn't matter, pen or pencil, whatever you have nearby. I'm just gonna grab, you know, some sharpies as Always. And I have a red pen here and we're just gonna keep it at that. I'll take a thick Sharpie and a thin Sharpie and that's all I'm going to use tonight. So let me zoom in a little bit here on the stream. I'll check in and say hello with you guys. And again, thanks for joining me. Again, this is a little different format. I'm going to try to go live Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday nights around 8:39 o'. Clock. Monday might be more of a kind of a structured class quote unquote. And then Wednesday will probably like an improv improvised sketch session. We'll just kind of what I usually do, you've seen me do in the past. And then Friday would be really cool if we maybe just do some Q and A. If you guys have common questions or you need advice or feedback, I have a community here on YouTube. You can use the chat community, leave me questions there or even on Facebook post me questions there. And we'll see. We'll see how that goes. So I'm kind of playing around a little bit. Thank you guys so much. And who do we have? We have Gigi. Gg, you're waiting the other room. You have two streams going. What the heck? How the heck did that happen? Thanks for telling me, Gigi. Wow, that is weird. Let me see how I have two streams going. Hold on guys, let me switch over. Thanks for telling me. That's interesting. Yeah, I see what you're saying. There's one that says notify me. Why didn't that. That should have started Autumn Auto magically. It didn't. So I'm going to put a comment here and have everybody join me in the other stream. That would be amazing. So can you join? Join me in the other stream. Sorry. And thanks. All right. I just posted a message. That is weird. I don't know why my software didn't start the one stream and it started a different stream. I shouldn't blame the software. It's probably me. So I don't know what happened, but thanks for telling me. So, yeah, if you guys come on over to the other one, that'd be cool. Add the link. Interesting. So I don't know if I have a link. I think I just have. Let me see here. We'll get rocking. Interesting. Interesting. I'm gonna go to my channel. How is it possible have two streams at once? All right, finally, here's the link. I'm going to copy and paste it. Gg, thank you. I think you just Saved my day. You. You are an awesome, awesome human being. And I always appreciate all your positive feedback. So I just pasted a link. Thank you, Gigi. I really, really appreciate you. You're a positive, amazing human being. Thank you so much. That was just practice. We'll start over again. Oh, my gosh. What the heck? That's interesting. I don't know if I can even end this one. Interesting, interesting. I'll leave this one going. And anybody pops in. And Facebook should be live too. Let me see. Yeah, Yeah, I hope so. I'll leave the comments in there. I don't. I'm not sure what the heck happened, but. Well, that'll have to figure out. I haven't. I know tech stuff. It's just what the heck. So anyway, I hope you're having a great, great day, Gigi. Hope all's well. And NYC and the double. The uws. Uws. I was just reading online about a church in the Upper west side that celebrities are fighting to keep from being torn down. You probably know the story. It's like an old, historic, really cool looking church, and I guess maybe some developer wants to tear it down and put up, I don't know, apartment units or something. So that's kind of an interesting thing happening, right? Yeah, I don't know how the other one. I can't. The other one's not letting me start for some reason. Use our chat. No worries. All right, so I'm gonna keep. I guess I'll keep going here. All right, so. So tonight, I don't know how many of you guys watching are creatives. I mean, who out there has actually maybe done artwork in the past? Whether it's sketching, painting, sculpting, clay, it could be ballet, cooking, it doesn't matter. Anything artistic, creative. And you just kind of lost the groove, right? You just kind of got away from it. And that happens, happens to all of us. And I think a lot of that is because of a few things. One is just we get lost in time. We're so busy with our lives that we just. We just don't make the time to do those creative things. We're stuck kind of in. In the quagmire of life, the everyday, right? We're just kind of anchored in. Lost the groove for creating. Another thing I find is just being afraid to start because you're afraid of a failure, not doing a good job, comparing yourself to other people, so you don't even start. It's a. It's a fear thing, right? So that's kind Of a second reason and another, another reason I find people and I'm going to focus kind of on sketching because that's what I do. And it's applied a lot of things. But another thing is we're afraid we don't have the right tools, the right materials to do the thing we want to do. We feel like we need to go out and buy that product. Perfect pen or sketchbook, right? Or if you're a. A dancer, maybe you're looking for that, those perfect shoes or it or baker, maybe you're looking for the perfect whisk. Do people still use whisks? So who the heck knows, right? But all, all those things kind of stop us from actually even starting to create. So it's a mindset. We got to kind of get. Get past that mindset and just get going. So one of the ways I like to do that is just five minutes. I call it the five minute rule. Set a timer for five minutes and just pick up a pen. And I want you to start with if you have a big like Sharpie or something or a big crayon. I like to start with kind of just something big. I'm going to use this. I have this cool big pencil here as well. And just throw some, throw down some lines. Put a timer on, put some music on. This is kind of my med incitation. We're just gonna let the pencil flow, pen flow. Just put something on paper. That right there is a connection from your brain to your heart, to your hands, to your paper. It's a start, right? We're doing something, we're putting something down. And we don't care what we're doing, what we're drawing, we're sketching. So we'll just start kind of doing it, doing it that way. So let's do it. So I'm going to put a timer on. I have some music going here. Again. Thanks, guys. This is a little different tonight. I'm going to do a little kind of instructional stuff and then we'll. I think I'll just end with my loose whatever sketches. So I'm not going to do it the full five minutes, but I'm just going to kind of scribble here for like a couple minutes. And I'm going to just do a Sharpie so you can see it better. And I don't even like to look at the page. Lots of times I just kind of just move my pen around or marker or crayon, whatever I'm using. I like to call this med inc. Tations meditation. Meditation is a great way to get into the creative flow. It's breaking that barrier where your brain says, no, I can't draw, I can't sketch, because you are. We can even call it scribbling. We're basically just scribbling, right? This is. This is creativity. Creativity. We're creating something. We started with nothing and now we have something. Right? So that's kind of just a really cool exercise when you first sit down and you want to do something creative or sketch, just do a meditation, listen to some music, close your eyes. Even, you know, I would say three to five minutes and just kind of do what I just did. I feel different. I feel different now. I feel a little more locked, Locked in. The creative juices are kind of going. So that's one thing we can do to start. Pretty cool. So meditation, it's a great, great thing. It's gonna grab a drink of water. Gigi says yes. The West Presbyterian Church. I hope no development, but it. But housing is needed. Oh, gotcha. Yeah. I don't know the story. What's going on with the. That church? So, right. There's always two sides, which is interesting. So could they take the church and convert it into housing like you. Sod. And convert the interior. I don't know the size of it or anything, but convert the interior to living spaces. Kind of like they did with the Domino Sugar factory. They kept the exterior, you know, the whole. The historic part. And they re got. They redid the interior of the building and they did some new stuff on the outside, like that big curved glass top. I love that building. Hey, Linda, great to see you. How are you? Long time no see. Love the new logo. Hey, thank you. Yeah. Shout out to my friend Dansky. Dansky is a big YouTuber. He does a lot of Photoshop stuff and he created this logo for me. So if you look at the logo, do you guys see anything, any shapes in the logo? What do you see? Let me see if I can make it bigger here. Let's check. Let's talk about the logo for a minute. I'm glad you brought that up. So check out the logo. Let me know in the comments. What do you guys see in that logo? Hey, gentlemen, thanks for making it. I don't know what the heck happened. I had two streams going. So I appreciate you popping over here. Thank you so, so much. And Gigi, thank you for giving me a heads up on that. You guys are awesome. So, yeah, so here, here's the logo. So I'll give you a minute. To kind of put in the comments. What do you see? A bridge. So, yes. So one thing. There is a bridge here. Awesome. So you picked up on the bridge. Also, here's a hint. Look at the overall shape. The overall shape of the logo. We definitely have a bridge inside it. There is also kind of two other things inside the logo, almost kind of hidden. It's fun to look at. So the. All right, so I'm going to tell you the other thing here in the logo. So if you look at the overall shape, it's like a pin that you would see, like on a. A Google map or a. An apple map. A mapel. We'll call an apple map a mapel. I just made that up. So it's kind of like the. The location marker. Right. Which is kind of cool. Right. I like to do urban sketching, so I'm out wherever the city, wherever I am sketching. So that kind of symbolizes location that I'm out on location sketching. I like traveling. So that goes with that. We have the bridge. Because I love bridges. You guys know I love the Brooklyn Bridge. I love a lot of different bridges. And bridges are good symbols. Bridges are symbols of a lot of things. One of the things I love is they're a symbol of connection. Right. Connecting you from one place to another. We could take that symbolism many different levels. Right. Bridges are awesome for connections. And the other thing is there is a pencil. Pencil. So if you look kind of in the middle, I don't think you can see my cursor moving. The bottom is the yellow is almost like the tip of the pencil. Then if you kind of go up towards the sun, there's a sun here. There's almost like a pencil shape. Like the tip of a pencil. Yeah. A sunny side. Yeah. I get the egg thing. That's a good yolk. That's a good yolk. About the egg. That really cracked me up. That joke cracked me up. Now my brain's a little scrambled. I have to think about it. Don't even get me started, man. Wow. I'm a little shell shocked. Awesome. You guys are funny. All right, so, yeah. So that's the logo. Yeah. My. He's a kind of Internet friend. Never met him, but he did a great job with it. Let's put it back in the corner. We see. We see. Awesome. All right, so we did our little meditation, guys. That's a great way just to break the fear of starting and sketching something. So that's kind of my lesson. I want to just put that out There to start with for tonight. Don't be afraid. Do something on paper. All right, let's sketch. Let's do some sketching. We're gonna get into this. I don't have anything in mind. So what am I going to sketch today? Yikes. You know what? I like to sketch. I'm going to sketch. Well, I'll just start sketching. So I'm actually. I don't have nothing in my brain. I'm just letting. Almost like the meditation. But I'm just. Maybe we could turn this into some kind of cityscape type of sketch happening. I don't know about you guys, but I am obsessed with water towers on top of buildings. So when I walk the high line, you could see some. A bunch of water towers, and I just love them. I'm always taking pictures of them. I've done sketches of them as well. So always look up when you're in the city. Look up at the buildings and you'll see these really cool water towers. So maybe just water tower happening in here. Kind of use them a little more. Appreciate you guys watching. Thank you so much. This will be a quick one, guys. I'm all wrap at 9 tonight. So, Jen, I was saying before, I want to go do live streams like Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. People have always asked if I have a schedule. So I'm going to try to do a schedule. And somewhere between 8, 39, something like that, nothing. If you guys are around, want to join in, that's awesome. If not, that's cool. I know. We all got lives, right? I do appreciate your time, though, and your encouragement, and I would love for you guys to actually do some sketching with me. So we'll plan if you have paper and pen and stuff Wednesday or Friday, just try. We'll do something together that could be fun. We'll break out some Sharpie creative markers tonight. I'm feeling like I'm going to add some color. Notice I'm keeping it very loose and sketchy. I don't. I'm not using a ruler. And the minute I break out a ruler, I take this out and put it on the page. I want to do this. Ready? And this is going to slow down my creative flow. I'm going to want to do this. Make beautiful, perfect, clean lines. Now, I do love technical drawings. I love precision. You know, being an architect, I have to do perfect, beautiful, clean line drawings. But this sketchbook is my playground. I don't want to go into this mode because it slows me down. My brain's Going pretty fast now. And I just want to just. Just go. Go with the rhythm in my brain, Go with the rhythm of the music. It's a way for me to clear out my brain from a busy day. So every line I'm throwing down here is clearing this bad boy right here. You guys have, like. You guys have, like, junk build up in your minds throughout the day. I think we all do. Right. This is a way for me to get that junk out of my head. And it's not all bad junk. It's just clutter. It's. It's just stuff that accumulates in there. And there's more stuff I accumulate in my brain the more tired I feel. Cool. All right, let's throw down some color. Maybe we got. If I do this kind of looks like the World Trade Center a little bit. That building right here, it's kind of trade Center Ish. All right, let's break out the Sharpie Creative markers. If I had to recommend. If you're just starting to sketch, I would recommend. Obviously, paper doesn't matter what kind of paper, unless you're watercoloring or adding ink, washes, and a lot of water. Then you want a thicker paper. You can just get mixed media paper. This is pretty thin paper here. Let's just get some paper. I'm going to say a Sharpie because I think Sharpies help build creative confidence. Once a line is down on the paper, it's staying. So we're not worrying about erasing it. We're not worried about changing it. It's down, it's down. So it builds a little bit of creative confidence. And then for color, I would. I would suggest. And this is. They are not a sponsor, but I wish they were Sharpie Creative markers. These are just, for me, the pinnacle of throwing quick color down, especially when I'm out urban sketching. Now, if I'm in New York City sketching these things dry quick. Watercolor doesn't dry quick. So I love these. Or. Or back up to. These would be color pencils. Let's throw down some color. Thank you so much. Do you dream? Do you dream sketches, Jason? Do I dreams sketches? I love your questions. Do I dream sketches? I gotta think about that. I don't. You know, I don't think I. Do you mean. You mean, do I, like, wake up with a sketch in my brain from sleeping? That's a great question. I don't think I do that. I think I dream more of having been in Jerry's. Some Chunky Monkey ice cream. I think I Have more ice cream dreams than I would have sketching. I love the questions. Cool. So see how these markers are really just kind of popping out things, You know? Are these the real colors? I don't know. Maybe in my brain, these are the colors I want them to be. My heart, I like to pick colors from the heart, from my gut, from my feelings. So that's kind of how I choose colors rather than being realistic. Nothing says NYC than water tanks. Yes, Gigi, That's a great way to put it. Iconic water tanks. Maybe next. You know what we'll do? Wednesday night live stream. We're going to sketch. We're going to focus on water tanks. I have a couple here. I'll see if I can pull them out. If my friend Cat is watching. Cat loves water tanks. Going to zoom in a little closer. All right, cool. You guys can see a little better. So check out these colors. Did I see Chip in the house? Chip. Chip over in the Facebook land. How are you, man? I hope you guys are doing well with that snowstorm that hammered you. I hope you're doing well. What do you guys think? Is this looking cool? Jen says. Yeah. Your gallery. Love your gallery. Hey, thank you. You checked out my gallery. Thank you so much. I'm gonna be adding more stuff to it. Yeah, let me know. Feedback on the gallery, guys. I'm just looking for my Sharpie. Where's my Sharpie, guys? How did I literally just lose a Sharpie that I had? I. I don't know. All right. It's like, where's Waldo? Where'd I put that Sharpie? Where? Oh, my gosh. I am going cray cray. I mean, I have more here, but that's weird. I don't know where it went. Like, do you sketch your dreams upon waking? Oh, great question. Here. Here's something I used to. Do you guys want to show and tell? Put in chat. Yes. For show and tell. If you say yes, this kind of relates to your question. I always have to pull out a sketchbook here. Even if you. I'm going to grab it anyway. I just saw it. Yes. The other day. All right. Somewhere in here, I have quick show and tell. Yes. Yes. All right. Show and tell. You guys got it.