Saturday Night Sketching

Hey, it's Saturday, February 28, 2026. It's the last day of the month. What? That's crazy. Where, where did this month go? It flew by so fast. Anyway, hope you're having a good day. Happy Saturday. It is. It was a nice 50 degree weather here in New Jersey. Snow on the ground, 50 degrees. If that doesn't mess with your mind, I don't know what does. But there's hope that warmer weather is on the way and that is awesome. I'm Jason with the inspired life where I love sketching, sketching architecture and actually just spreading overall positive vibes, personal development, mindset and, and yeah, I believe creativity is a really awesome skill that we have and we can use it for positivity in the world. So join me tonight. We'll do a little show and tell. I want to talk about some of my favorite tools I like using these days. So I have a little show and tell. We'll start off with tonight. Little personal greeting and thank you I want to do as well. And we'll sketch something. So stay tuned. It's 8:27pm Just a very random time to pop on. But you know what, I'm here. I hope you're doing great. So let's, let's start off with just a quick show and tell of some of my favorite tools and I'll walk you through. We'll do. Yeah, I'll just kind of go through and show you what I have here that I like using. In no particular order, I just kind of have a pile of stuff here. We'll start here with the Lock B. This is a lock B quattro, which I love for a few different purposes. I keep pens in it and I also keep color pencils. So when I use colored pencils, I'll show you the ones I like the most. So these are my favorite colors. And I have, right here we have light aqua boom, neon yellow and neon pink are. Those are probably my top three fave colors. And I need to throw chartreuse in there. I do like, I do like this blue color but it's not my fave fave. So I would say these are my top four favorite colored pencil colors right here. And, and they're Prismacolor premier colored pencils. They glide on the paper so smooth like butter. So I love, love these. And this is just a great little pouch to carry them in. Yeah. And it zips up so really cool. Convenient. So one, that's one of my favorite tools. Let me, let's talk about the next Tool. I like Lock B. This is the Lock B field journal. So I started with Lock B. This was the very first product, product of theirs I ever used. I still love this field journal. I kind of upgraded a little bit from it. But I use this for, I don't know, three, four years solid. It's really worn out. I love this so much and it's really cool. You know, you can keep field notes in there, other journals in there for sketching. A pen pocket, pocket for papers and other miscellaneous items. And when I say upgraded, I went to the Lock B portfolio here underneath. And the main reason I upgraded is because I like the zipper enclosure on this. So this is my go to now. They take everywhere. And this zipper feature is amazing because I don't have to worry about anything falling out. And it's kind of stuffed. You can see it's pretty wide there. And if I open it, I have a couple of lock me five and a 5.8 by 8.3 inch paper in here. I think you can fit like four in there. I have a different size field notes kind of journal in there. Some paper. Yes. I am paranoid about paper. Whenever I go out sketching, I make sure I have tons of paper. So I have this in here. Moleskine. Again, this is no random, just random orders. I love this little Moleskine journal. It's great. It fits in the pocket really easily. So I take this with me. Easy to take out on the fly, you know, I could stand there, do quick sketches. These are some sketches from when I went to MoMA back in 2023. Kind of documented my day a little bit. What else do we have in here? A little quick. These are some high line sketches. These are some buildings along the High Line. There's a. I love that water tower. And there's the shed building. So usually carry one of those with me as well. And then I have a bigger size. This is something I actually started using more recently, this bigger size Moleskin. And why I like this is because I can open it and I could do some big spreads in here. And I just. Last one I did was a cool Grand Central. Here it is. This was a Grand Central sketch I did. So there's some of the papers I like to use. Also in here I have a lot of different pens. I just. I won't go through these in detail, but I do like the Sarah Sarasa zebra Sarasa bulb. These are, sorry gel pens. They're awesome. We gotta talk Sharpie. I mean, Sharpie is my go to number one writing sketching implement. So 90s 98.63% of the time. I don't know the actual calculation but I will use Sharpie 98, 99% of the time for my sketches and a couple reasons. One, it's water resistant. So if I sketch something and I come back and I add ink or watercolor, it's not going to bleed the black ink. So it's permanent. And I just have always consistent results with Sharpie so. And I also started recently using this blue color. So black Sharpie is my go to there. And also I love sketching with ballpoint pens. I love these multi color pens. This actually has a lead holder on it as well. So it's really. This is a cool pen. All right. So yeah, I thought it'd be fun to start with a quick show and tell. People are always asking me what do I like to sketch with. So figure we'll just do some of that right now. I'll definitely more than happy to answer questions, do some demonstrations. We can focus and zero in on later shows in more detail. I do have to talk about this as well. This is a lock. The lock B. Oh my gosh. Pouch. Lock B Pouch here. I love this. This has got a lot of use. You can see it's kind of dirty and that's cool. I like the worn look. This is my go to for just. There is so much room in these EDCs everyday carry pouches. This one I have like pencils in there, pencil sharpener on that side. But the side I use mostly is this for my Sharpie Creative markers. I mean I have a. I have a bunch in there, right. I have a couple of these pouches. One has like computer charging cables and tech equipment in it. These are really awesome. So I love that pouch watercolor. Let's talk watercolors. So this is my favorite go to watercolor travel kit. Windsor Newton Cotman watercolor kit. This is the first one I ever had. I still have it for many, many, many years. I just love this thing. It fits in my pocket. Easy to carry around. It has a little spot for a brush on here as well. And this is just easy, compact, great to carry around. And I love the colors. Colors have been replaced over time with these are not all Windsor Newton colors. There's some other brands in here as well. So I like to take that soho. This has become. This is one of my new go to sketching sketchbooks. I love the craft paper. It's kind of thin, 65 pounds so I can't really do a Watercolor or heavy ink washes on it. But I love this because of the way the colors pop on the brown craft paper. These are creative markers. You see a gel pen as well. So I am loving, loving this as my kind of go to sketch. One of my go to sketchbooks and it lays flat, which is really nice. Another go to sketchbook when I want to do watercolors or ink washes is the Fabriano 1264 Cold Press watercolor paper. So I love this made in Italy. How can I not love it? Because I'm half Italian. The good half. The good half. So I like this paper. My go to watercolor paper. I love the spiral binding on it. I can lay pages flat. It also is perforated along here so I can tear out pages easily if I want to. And yeah, I use these all the time. What else, what else? A couple other things here and then we'll get rocking and rolling ink. So my favorite go to color ink is right here called Apple Snail. Love using this ink for washes. And I love this acrylic ink here. Color is called Reflex Rose. A little bit of neon pink. So I love these two kind of inks for doing washes with. What else Brush. All this bamboo brush. So much fun. There are so many other things I can talk about. What else? I think that's those are my main go to tools for sketching that I'm currently using. I recently re added a gel pen back into the mix as well. All right, cool. So just a quick segment that was unsponsored. I just want to be honest and kind of show you the things I love using. So I did that out of love. I will say though, I do. I am a lockbee. What do you call it? So I have a deal kind of a thing with Lockbee. If you use my discount code, I'm a lock be ambassador. That's the word. I couldn't think of it. So if you use my discount code on the screen, you will receive a 10% discount. Of course there are some rules that apply. Your price doesn't get marked up and I get a little just a small kind of thank you back from Lockbe for promoting their stuff. And I promote them because I use them. I every, literally every day I'll use a lock, one of my Lockbe products. All right, cool. So hope you enjoyed that quick show and tell of materials and tools. I'll check in the chat, say hello and we'll do some sketching. Hey D. Ray. Oh my gosh. So good to see you, how are you? I hope you're doing well. It is so nice to see you in the chat. I hope you're doing well, my friend. It's always fun having you commenting Italian. I am, Yeah, I am. I am half Italian. My mother's side of the family is, is Italian. So that's cool. That's where I got my mean cooking skills and baking skills from. I made some pretty dang good bolognese today. I think that's my top thing. I make the best and I think today was in the top two best of all time. So love making that bolognese. Thanks to my Italian heritage. Alright, cool. All right, awesome. So let's do some sketching. I'm also, well, I don't know what I'm also going to do. I don't know what I'm going to sketch. I have no plans. I didn't. I don't have anything pre planned that I want to do. So you will jump into the craft book. We'll do something in there. Loosey goosey. Yes. And a love of pizza of course. I always say my love for pizza. Pizza is more than a love. I, I could eat it every day of the week. Yeah. All right. That's so funny. All right, cool. Hey guys, before we do that, I want to gonna jump to the the first person cam point of view. I want to make just kind of a quick announcement in person. So prepare yourselves. I'm going to go large on your screen. All right. Different viewpoint. All right, cool. Different viewpoint. Hey. I just wanted to thank everybody. I'm so excited. I hit 1k, 1k subscribers on the YouTube channel which is awesome. I've been streaming I think five years, if not longer, six, maybe seven and 1k was just a number I wanted to get to and it's so exciting that I got to that one K. So I'm hype about that and I think I want to do a 1k sketch giveaway. I'm going to make an announcement. We're going to do that Monday night. So I'm going to live Stream Monday night, 8:30pm Eastern Time. And for anybody that's watching live, we'll do a random drawing and I will give away a sketch and I have another. We'll give away something else but I'm not going to say what that is yet. So you need to be watching live. We'll start 8:30pm Monday night. That's eastern time. I'll be on probably till like 9:38. Yeah, between 9 and 9:30. You know me I'll go till 9:30, so let's do that. That'd be so much fun. So feel free to show up. I'd love to see you here. Monday night, 8:30pm I will stream to YouTube, Instagram and Facebook all at the same time and we'll figure out how. We'll give do the giveaway and I might do something else. I might do a little auction as well and we'll auction off some sketches. So if you look behind me here, here's what I want to kind of show. First of all, again, thank you so much. It means so much to me that you guys spend time with me, whether it's live. Replays. I was gonna say reruns. I don't know. I don't think they call them reruns in YouTube land. Replays, comments, Facebook, whatever, TikTok. It doesn't matter which channel you watch me on. I appreciate it so, so much you're allowing me to help. Give me the energy, enthusiasm and encouragement to talk about and share good, positive vibes through doing something that I just love doing. And I hope through the positivity, it's kind of catching and it spreads, whether it brings you a moment of peace or a moment of joy or you pick up some kind of sketching or drawing tip or creative mindset tip or anything positive. Maybe meet someone in the community and this is what this is about. It's positivity through creativity. So thank you. 1k is awesome. All right. Love it, love it. If you look behind me, hey, I see Lori Jean on YouTube. Thank you for watching. I hope you're doing well, big boy. Sally. Wow, thank you so much. I opened YouTube to stick on a playlist whilst watching my updated travel palette and this was a top Recommendation. Congrats on 1K subs. Hey, hey. That's great to know. Thank you. All right, behind me, you may see this again Monday. But here are the two kind of sketches that started it all for me on the Here we have the Once Upon a Time sketch. This is not the original. The original is much smaller. It's a poster of it. Once Upon a Time sketch was my first ink and wash, like watercolor wash sketch I ever did back in 20. I'm sorry, back in 2001, that's when I started just really, really getting into sketching and showing others besides architecture. Just kind of a more personal sketching. The one here, boom. If I can point to it. Yeah, that one. You guys might recognize that iconic building. That iconic building is. I'm pausing for drama. Is it working? We gotta love dramatic effect. That is Cinderella's castle at Walt Disney World. That was one. If I remember correctly, one of the very first YouTube live stream sketches I did when I used to sketch standing up and having my stuff on an easel before I got lazy and started sitting down. So that is, that's the one. And that's actually. You can find that on my YouTube channel, like a speed play of it and see how I sketched it. So it's just fun to have those kind of there in the background to see where I started from. And then next to those it's so hard to point. There we go. On the whiteboard there is just a few, maybe like 20 or 30 of my. Not 30 of my NYC sketches that I just hang up there. My kind of gallery wall. So thank you guys so, so much. All right, remember Monday, 8:30pm here, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, watch live and we'll do a sketch giveaway for anybody watching. Boom. All right, let's go back to the desk. I noticed people dropping off quick when I showed my face. Might be a correlation. Idk. Alright, let's do some sketching. I think we're gonna do. This is what we did last night. This came kind of cool. Very different. I was kind of inspired as I was going along by the colors of like Mondrian and you know, the reds and blues and yellows and whites. Yeah, this was just from my imagination. I was just wanted to do like a little quick perspective. So that was fun. But I feel like I think we're doing one of these scape one of these scapes here. So let's throw down some color and I'm going to wrap up by 9 o' clock tonight because I'm pretty beat. All right, let's do one of these bad boys. Laura Jean says that was a fun one. Hey, thank you. Glad you enjoyed it. So let's do another escape tonight. You guys are awesome. And if you're watching on the YouTube, I'd love for you to hit that, that thing, what do you call that? The thumbs up emoji. That'd be so cool. If you haven't subscribed, subscribe, Share it out there. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. I'd love for you guys to share this stuff out there. Not being greedy, but 1k is awesome. So I'm so excited to hit that. Let's. I don't know, I think 3K would be in a good next target. So let's hit. Let's go for the 3K next. All right. I'm just bringing out some colors here. And if you want to listen along with me, you can go on my. Go on Spotify, I have Inspired Life playlist. You can find it, I think. And you could just hear what I'm listening to. Not the exact song, but at least get an idea. All right, we'll throw down. Let's see. Let's throw some yellow on here. And then we'll turn this into some kind of imaginary skyline. Maybe. Maybe. It's. All right. So I'm just throwing up blocks of color, a little bit of detail. Kind of windows with white gel pen. I use some Sharpie as well. Black Sharpie. And this is fun. It's just about layers on here. We'll throw a couple more things on. And I need to add a bridge on here somewhere. So I've been adding bridges. I love this, by the way. I think that came out cool because I added a bridge there. Bridge on that one bridge there as well. So what's cool about these is they're just kind of off the cuff. Not really. Not planning or thinking about really thinking. I know it sounds kind of weird. I'm just throwing down colors on top of colors. Kind of pulling out shapes it. For that. I am seeing the Empire Steel Building in this one down here. So I might pull this one out to be very Empire State Building. Like, oops, this is the one. One of my gel pens is not working. I think it's that. It. Not sure where to put the bridge on this one yet. So I'm not going to throw it on there. Yeah, let's kind of pull out the Empire State Building. Let me see. Let me. Let's try with a Sharpie first. This one doesn't work, does it? Nope. I'm striking out. I keep. I keep hanging on to these Sharpies that I think I said. I think I said this on every show for the past week. I keep hanging on to these Sharpies. I can't part with them. Even the ones that don't work. What's up with them apples? There we go. So you kind of just pulled that shape out a little bit. Loosely inspired by the Empire State Building. Did I just sound like. Did I just sound like William Shatner? I don't know why. Loosely inspired by the Empire State Building. All right, cool. We gotta throw a bridge on here, kids. Where am I going to put that bridge? I'm thinking too much about it. I'm not going to think we're just going to do it. Going to do it here. Done. We'll turn him back now. I do. I want to throw down some color, though, underneath, so the white pops. So let's just throw down some blue on here. There we go. So that white will pop a little bit better. It. All right, let's do the bridge cables again over the blue. There we go. Much better. Now you can see them. Great. Because they're popping out. All right, we got some kind of bridge happening there. We'll do a base on it. Maybe we'll do the base. Throw a block of color down. I'm feeling yellow. Feeling yellow like. Like Big Bird. Big Bird. So maybe that's kind of the bottom of the bridge. And we'll pull out some cables and we'll use red as well, actually, maybe at least. I'm not sure. Yeah, I said red first. Let's do some. It. Cool. I've never been to New York. I'm in Canada. Okay, cool. I look out my window and see cows and horses from the farm across my street. New York looks busy. Love the color use. Oh, thanks. Yeah, New York City is a busy, busy place. So I'm from a small rural town here in northern New Jersey, about an hour. About an hour away from New York City. So I love that I get to experience two kind of contrasting worlds. Small rural town, kind of in a valley here. And then, you know, with an hour, hour and 15 minutes, I could be in the city, which is different. It's so energetic, so busy, so chaotic. But you know what's cool? I love that vibe. But what's also cool is that when I'm sketching in New York City, I can. The city slows down sketching. How do I. How do I explain it? The city kind of slows down as I'm sketching. Like, I can block out the noises around me because I'm so locked in on capturing what I'm seeing, that I'm. I'm in the zone. Right. So sketching is a really cool tool if you need to get in the zone, kind of lock. Lock in and block out things around you. But, yeah, New York is very, very busy. And that's kind of what I'm trying to capture with these cityscapes. Kind of a busyness about them, but in a vibrant way. So I'm glad that that's a great comment. I love that. I've tried sketching horses. Not horses, but cows, by the way, you can ask any of the inklings. Original inklings from way back. Yeah. Not very. Not very good at sketching animals yet. I mean, I Could practice. Some practice. And for fun, I'll occasionally sketch. I like sketching rabbits, but that's cool that you get to see cows. I love that. Are you ever inspired by your surroundings to paint or draw or sketch whatever you see? I think this one's almost done. I'd love to go to Canada sometime. I have never been. If I go to Canada, where should I visit? Where should I visit in Canada? I'm up for any pro tips. Oh, you know what? I didn't. I did not add a water tower. Let's see. Maybe we'll do one at the top of this building. I'm gonna. Let's see. I'm gonna bring up the blue a little bit, and then I'm gonna do the water tower in white. So I'm gonna give it kind of a background to sketch over. So what's fun with these shapes is you can keep building them out either with the same color or you can layer different colors on top. So I just literally kind of built that out because I know I want to do a water tower on there. So I bought myself some extra real estate. Canada is so big and very spread out. It takes days to drive across one province. Oh, I am sure. I am so sure. Have you done the Hudson river area where. Where the plants safely landed? I'm trying to think where that landed on the Hudson. So, yeah, I've. I've sketched along the Hudson. I'm trying to remember exactly where the plane landed. I think you're talking about the Sully, right? With Sully, the pilot. I have sketched stuff along the Hudson river area for sure. The World Trade center area. I've sketched the vessel. Hudson Yards area. I have sketched as well. One of my favorite areas in New York City is Hudson Yards, which is. It's just. For me, it's just an incredible, like, futuristic architecture. Outrageous, outrageous costs. In that area. They have the High Line, which was an old elevated railway they converted into this incredible public park. I. I love the High Line. We got some kind of water tower. I'll zoom in on this when I'm done so you guys can see some things close up. And I'm going to wrap up and a couple of minutes. If any final questions or comments, please put them in the chat. All right, cool. Awesome. All right, so here's how this one turned out. I think this one's done. So we did another escape. These are kind of fun and quick to do. Get a little closer. You can see kind of some of the shapes. Awesome. There we go. Alrighty then, let me check the chat one last time and we'll wrap up. So thank you guys for watching live. I appreciate that so, so much. It's been fun coming on tonight and doing a quick live stream for you. And again, thank you for the 1K subscribers. That's amazing. I'm so, so excited. So Monday night, about 8:30pm I'll come and we'll, yeah, we'll do some kind of sketch giveaway. I think that'll be fun. I appreciate all so, so much. Until we meet again. Sketch boldly, live creatively and inspire endlessly. Good night. Lori Jean thank you for watching live. D Ray I appreciate your watching live as well over on the Facebook and we had big boy Sally also comment. So thank you so, so much. Peace.