In this informal livestream, high‑school teacher and architect Jason Nicholas greets viewers, shares his personal routine, and explains his goal for the evening: to create abstract acrylic backgrounds that will serve as a foundation for New York City‑themed sketches. He demonstrates his material setup—Liquitex Basic Acrylics, water, brushes, markers, gel pens, and color pencils—while spontaneously applying fluorescent reds, pinks, blues, and cadmium yellow to two blank sketchbook pages, experimenting with double‑page spreads. Throughout the session he interacts with the chat, answers questions about his paint brand, and acknowledges viewers on Instagram and YouTube. After the backgrounds dry, he sketches the Vessel at Hudson Yards, choosing turquoise for its copper structure, comparing the texture of markers versus colored pencils, and adding neon yellow highlights. He briefly mentions possible future sketches (e.g., Brooklyn Bridge) and personal plans to visit MoMA or the Met. The livestream concludes with a reminder to “sketch boldly, live creatively, and embrace imperfection.”
Chapters
Hey everybody, um, let's move that over. Hey everybody, how you doing? It is Thursday, May 14th, 2026. Hope you're having an awesome day. Jason Nicholas Nicholas here with The Inspired Life, and, um, I think I'm live. Hopefully I'm live. I'm talking to you, so I'm definitely alive. I'm popping on for a few minutes today and let's do— I don't know, I think I know what I want to do. Maybe some sketching. Actually, I think I'll show you what we're going to do in a minute. If you don't know who I am, my name is Jason Nicholas Nicholas. I am a high school teacher, an architect, a— I love to draw and sketch, and all around just creative. Creativity is my go-to thing. I love it so, so much. And hopefully I am not lagging a little bit. Let's see, let's do some settings. So I came on unplanned. I even still have— I don't know what to listen to on the music here. I have my watch on, but I wanted to come on while I still had the motivation. All right, let's switch over to the desk cam. Boom. All right, there we go. Let me zoom out a little bit. All right, hope you guys can hear me okay. Let's see, let's move the camera. There we are. Happy Thursday! Let's do something fun. I need to create some more abstract backgrounds in the sketchbook. I am behind schedule on it, and I thought tonight we would just throw down some abstract colors on a couple of blank pages and take it from there. It's 9:19 PM here in the Garden State, and I don't think I'll be on too, too long tonight. I'm I've been up since 3 AM. My pup woke me up early yesterday— or wait, this morning. And, uh, it's been a long day. Long day, but a good day. Just got home from a nice, uh, function at school, so I am not complaining. I feel like I'm freezing. If you're watching on Instagram, let me know. Or am I— is my camera freezing? Hmm. I just want to make sure I have all the extra tabs and whatnot closed. So let's just do that. Let me know where you're watching from. Let me know, how was your day today? I hope you had a great day. Let's kind of center that a little bit. There we go, perfect. And let me close that. Sometimes if I have too many tabs open Uh, my livestream likes to glitch out and we don't want to glitch out. All right, all right, let's throw down some color. I'm going to find some blank pages on here. And we'll just kind of pick these pages. So I only have one goal tonight, and that really is just to create some abstract backgrounds so I can add some more New York City sketches. You know, this is the path we're on in this sketchbook right now, just doing these abstract New York City sketches on top of these cool backgrounds. All right, let's just do it. All right, I have a paintbrush, I have some water here, and I'm just going to grab some acrylic paint. And literally, this is just all random, so I'm just going to grab the colors I got right here in front of me and let's throw it down. No rhyme or reason other than I'm just using colors I like, colors I'm kind of feeling right now, uh, in the moment. We'll just kind of work on two pages at once here. You know what I might do? I haven't done like a double page spread, so maybe we'll Actually, maybe that we'll do, um, some double page spreads in here. That would be kind of fun. Yeah, why not, right? All right, so we're just throwing down some abstract background. I'm prepping some pages for like so I can start adding some more New York City kind of inspired sketches on here. So if you're just joining me, I hope you're having a great, great day. We're just throwing down colors, guys. That is my only plan. Nothing, nothing deep, nothing cray-cray other than just having some fun and slinging some paint. Is that the expression? Slinging paint. So I wanted to add kind of a— I have a lot of warm colors, so I'm going to throw some cool on here to just bring it back a notch. Right, cool. Throw just a couple more colors and then we'll let this dry. This will— I think this will turn out to be an interesting background to do some New York City, um, sketching on top of, but we won't see that until tomorrow. I'm just gonna prep these and maybe do a quick, um, sketch on my way out. So stay tuned for a couple more minutes and we'll see where we head. Let me know where you're watching from. Please feel free to say hello in the chat. It's always good to say hello to you guys. Let's see, I want some fluorescent red. Just want to really— I'm going to make a nice kind of a really pop this red on here. Let's just bring some of this pink back on. All right, I think this will be the last color I throw down on, uh, on this one for now. All right, cool. I think this will be a good background to do some sketching on top of. Um, hey Cardin, I see you on Instagram. Good to see you, hope you're well. Lori Jean, I see you on YouTube, hope you're doing well also. Always good to see you. Love the colorful backgrounds. Hey, thank you. Yeah, so this is— I'm just prepping more pages for these sketches. So I want to keep doing my NYC sketching, so I need to prep some backgrounds. What type of paint do you use? Oh, good question. I am using Liquitex Basic Acrylics. Boom. So, um, um, this is the only acrylic paint I've ever really used, has been Liquitex, and I've always liked it, so I just stuck with it all these years. So this is Fluorescent Pink. I also use fluorescent red tonight. We use some light blue violet, and I also threw down some yellow, uh, what was this one, just cadmium yellow. So really good questions. Yeah, these will be fun to sketch on top of. I'm not sure, I'm thinking in my brain I might do one I'm thinking of doing a Brooklyn Bridge sketch maybe that covers both pages across here. So that's what's in my brain. It could change when we go back to work on this next time. I'm gonna put this aside, let it dry, and then I think we're just gonna wrap up with a quick sketch. Thank you for asking the question, I always appreciate that. Uh, let me grab— what are we— let's actually have this here. We're just sketching our Soho paper on our Soho paper tonight. Uh, I don't know, maybe I'll just add some color. This is the Vessel in Hudson Yards. Maybe just add some color on the sketch here. Why not? So I'm thinking turquoise would be cool on here, even though the vessel is a copper, um, copper structure. I think it's copper. I'm gonna just color it with this color because I feel like I'm just in a turquoise kind of mood. And we'll use some Creative Marker. I'll also throw down— we'll try color pencil as well. So it's really hard to tell the difference in color between the pencil and the marker, which I love. Uh, up close, the texture is different. You can definitely see a difference. Yeah, definitely a difference in the texture, but just at face value, the colors are almost spot on with each other. That's pretty cool. Let's throw down some neon yellow. I gotta sharpen it first. Alright, so I'm just adding some color to the Vessel sketch. Uh, Vessel is a structure located in Hudson Yards. I think it's cool, and some people really hate it. I think it's— I can say it's beautiful, but I think it's just an interesting— basically like a sculpture that you can walk up. It has stairs inside. Um, it's— I have never walked up here, but I think architecturally it's— or sculpturally, it's interesting. I'm not a hater, that's for sure. I gotta get some more gel pens. There we go. I want to throw some white down in here. Let me zoom in a little closer. There we go. Alright, cool. I like this sketch of the vessel. I think it looks really cool. I'm going to zoom out and we'll just write on here what it is. Let's see, I think I'm going to just pull the edge out with some brown, and then we'll wrap on this Thursday night. Thursday night, May something, 16th, May 14th. This year is flying by, guys. It is so crazy, so, so crazy. Got to make sure we slow down and enjoy the days when we can. Got my Met card here, a MoMA card. Maybe I'll go hit one of those places Saturday or Sunday. If I get some work done, that'd be cool. Why the heck not? Alright guys, thank you so much for watching tonight. Until we meet again, sketch boldly, live creatively, and embrace imperfection. See you soon.
