SKETCH Fearless : Loose Lines + No Apologies

Hey, it's, uh, Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026. Jason Nicholas Nicholas here with the Inkspired Life. Hope you're having an awesome day today. Um, it is, uh, about 8:29 PM here on, like I said, a Wednesday, and I'm popping on. Let's do some sketching. I really have no idea what we're going to sketch, um, which is kind of normal for the live stream. So we're just going to open up my, uh, Lachby folio, find a page, and we'll just kind of throw some lines down, have fun, maybe add color, and we'll see where we go from there. Um, so yeah, let's do it. All right, so let's see. Last time I think we sketched this together, thanks to, um, one of the amazing viewers out there gave me the suggestion for that. So we did a boat. I think it was— hmm, I think it was Jen who did that. So thank you for the suggestion. Quick perspective, and we're gonna roll with this page. There's stuff on it. I was kind of doing some scribbling. The other day, which is play around this page and add some color, have some fun. And that's what it's about. Sketching, for me, one of the awesome benefits is just a cool way for me to wind down from a busy day, change my state of being, um, and just have, have fun. This is, this is fun for me. Uh, sometimes I'll set a creative intention and then and go with that, but sometimes I don't. So tonight's my creative intention is— what do we want to do? Um, you know, it's really simple. I already said it, I just want to have fun. So no rules other than having fun. All right, let's throw down some color. Again, I don't know, we don't know where this is going to go, and it may not go anywhere, and Not going anywhere is still a destination. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Alright, so as I'm sketching this, I'm actually start— starting to see something in my brain here. Um, I'm seeing almost like a tower structure, maybe even some kind of like lifeguard station, maybe. So that's kind of where my brain's going right now. So let's just keep going down that path. I'm not going to change direction. We're just going to embrace what this is saying here and just go, go for it. Again, I just want to have fun, and I've already had— I'm already having fun. I do think after this quick sketch, we'll, we'll end up going, uh, and we'll do some new— a New York City inspired sketch. So I'm headed to Central Park on Saturday, I think, to do some sketching. So maybe we'll do something inspired by Central Park. We'll see. So stick around for a few more minutes and, uh, we'll see where that road goes to. Apparently it's high tide here at the beach because, yes, the lifeguard tower is now being engulfed by water. Actually, let's break this out. I haven't used this in a while. This is pretty cool. It's like a multicolor pencil. I actually believe it's water soluble, so you could almost use it, um, you know, use it like a watercolor. Maybe we'll do that. Maybe we'll throw down some— I do— maybe we'll throw some water on here and just for fun see what happens. So yeah, so this is a water-soluble color pencil. Um, it's pretty cool, it has all these different colors on it. So it's multi-mix, um, and then this paper is kind of on the thin side, so I don't want to put too much water down and, and, uh, kind of bleed, bleed through the paper or tear the paper. But you can put a little bit of, uh, moisture on here. Cool. Zoom in a little closer. We need a number. Don't lifeguard stations usually have like a number on them? Hmm, do I have— I'm looking for something, let's think of like a pink number on here. Let's, let's grab, um Let's grab our neon pink here. We'll just call it station number 2. Yeah, it's not really showing that well. Again, that's okay, we're just having fun, right? That's the whole mission today. So I hope you are having a good day. I hope your summer is going well. There was some cray cray weather here in, uh, New Jersey yesterday. Fortunately, we— where I am, we, um, didn't feel the brunt of it. And we had some wicked thunder and rain, but there were areas not too far from here where a tornado or tornadoes maybe touched down. So it's kind of really freaky weather lately, and I hope everybody that isn't, you know, in those areas, I hope you're doing okay. I hope your power is coming back. Um, I just hope you're all being, being safe. It was really kind of just insane. I drove through part of that on my way home yesterday, um, not too far from where the tornadoes were going through. So no issues fortunately on my end, thank God. But yeah, this weather has just been even— it's just chaos, maybe. I don't know. How's to describe it? Yeah, this has turned out to be just a fun little sketch here. I likey likey. Let me know if you have any questions, comments. Feel free to say hello if you're watching. On YouTube, be sure to hit that thumbs up. Give me that thumbs up, I would love that. Let's share this stream out there, let's spread positivity through creativity. That would be amazing. My Facebook viewers, Instagram, share this, like this, please do all that social media jazz. Um, I really would love to see this community, uh, grow to the next level. Uh, Instagram, I would love to see Instagram grow to 1,000 followers. If that happens I can actually then livestream from my phone using Instagram. Right now it says, no, you can't do it, you don't have enough followers. Although I can livestream here in the studio, but not on my phone. So that'd be a really cool goal to hit. Um, I'm really not a numbers person. I'm really about the quality of viewer like you, uh, you know, being out there in positive vibes. That's huge, and that's really, really important. And that's kind of what this is about, just I'm just trying to spread my positivity through something I love doing, and hopefully, uh, it's infectious, and hopefully you get some benefits out of watching this. I always love to say hello to you all. Y'all. Hey y'all. I don't know why I said that. I can't see that too in that light, in that lifeguard tower. We're just going to break out this white paint pen, and I don't know if that's going to help. Yeah, I think you can see a little better. Station number 2. All right, cool. Let's take a little frame around this just for fun and kind of frame it up. I'm just looking at different ways to crop it. Again, we just started off with a page that has scribbles on it, so we're seeing scribbly up top, and that's cool. It's all fun. Let's take a small— sometimes I like just to take these really small frames and I kind of want to pop the lifeguard tower out more. How should we do that? Let's use a bold, big bold red Sharpie. Really going to pop this thing out. Boom, boom. I just want to kind of get the outline there. I do want to add some— I was looking for my purple Creative Marker. I don't have it out. All right. So I'm just grabbing and going with what's within arm's reach here. So, um, let's go with— I want to do some hatch lines here. Just go to my good old Sharpie. I'm going to create like some depth on this a little bit. So we'll do hatch lines like that, and then we'll do Where else do I want to add some? Maybe under— I like the yellow there. All right, maybe we'll just pull these cross bracing out a little bit more. We have some kind of ladder maybe going up here. Boom. And I think outlining that too there kind of makes it pop more. I want to put a color inside that kind of window opening. Let's go with the yellow. Very cool. All right, so just— it turned out to be just a quick little, um, lifeguard station. Who the— I didn't know where the heck this was going. Just, if you missed the beginning, go back and check it out. You can see we just kind of started with scribbles on a page and just playing around, and it morphed into a little lighthouse— lighthouse lifeguard station. All right, cool. Uh, so what I want to do next is let's do something New York City inspired. If you are watching and you want to have some idea, or you have some ideas of a building or structure in New York City, just put in the chat. I'm more than happy to take a look, and we'll see if you have any ideas. Just throw them in there and we'll see what we're going to sketch next. And I think we're going to sketch that in— uh, we're going to break out here. Actually, we'll do in one of these ugly books here. I'm loving, loving the ugly book sketchbooks. Um, check them out. I have a link, theinkspiredlife.com/tools. It should be in the chat or in the description. Check it out. You can see all my favorite tools, and there's some discounts and stuff available. Ugly Books is definitely on that list. Love, love Ugly Books, and they are kind enough to have donated sketchbooks for my upcoming workshop, uh, on August 1st. In Brooklyn during Stationery Fest. So I have a workshop there, um, I'm excited to be teaching it. I think there are still seats available. Go to them inspiredlife.com, you can see more information about the Loose Style NYC sketching workshop August 1st. Be cool to have you join us. All right, awesome. All right, so you can see I've been sketching all kinds of fun things— Liberty Torches and some landscape stuff. Boom! Empire State Building, uh, the Domino Sugar Factory, uh, yeah, fashion t-shirt stuff. St. Patrick's, my— one of my absolute favorite, favorite buildings. So I, I'm thinking, um, I don't have any suggestions, so I think I'm gonna do The Copper Building. I love the Copper Building in NYC. Let me see, I think I have a sketch behind me I can pull off the wall. I do. Grab it. All right, cool. All right, so this is, this is an example of the Copper Building, New York City. Near the, um, East 34th Street ferry pier. Uh, one of my absolute most favorite buildings in New York City. It's modern, it's clean. I love the lines, the colors of it. This is just my inter— one of my interpretations. I've done so many different sketches of this building, um, and has this really, really cool pedestrian, um, bridge or sky bridge here up top that connects to parts of the building. It almost looks like the letter H with some kind of bending going on there. I think— did we do it in here also? Yeah, I think in my— this is my NYC calendar sketchbook. So the idea is that these will turn into images for a calendar. I think the copper is in here. It's one of the earlier, earlier ones we did. Yeah. So here's another take on the Copper Building. So again, you can see that sky bridge and the two parts of the tower. It's called the Copper Tower because it is actually clad in copper cladding panels. So let's just do a version of the, the Copper Building here in our little ugly books sketchbook here. Hello, I see Mr. Mr. Tive on Instagram. Hopefully Artive, I'm not sure how I say that, but thanks for joining on Instagram, appreciate that. All right, so blank page, we'll just sketch it. Actually, you know what, just do it right here next to St. Patrick's. We'll do it on this side. All right, copper building, here we go. So the Copper Building is basically shaped like the letter H. Sometimes I'm looking at buildings to sketch, I do— I look at, you know, there's overall shapes and, you know, do they form some kind of a letter? Eiffel Tower, right? Eiffel Tower is basically like the letter A, right? So what we can do here, just quick Eiffel Tower, like super quick, think of the letter A. Boom. A has some kind of curves to it, right? So that's kind of like our A shape. And then just do some diagonal, some cross bracing. Boom. Little thing at the top. That's just a really quick shorthand. They even know how to do the Eiffel Tower, so think letter A. I see someone called Suspicious Fox on Instagram. Hello, Suspicious Fox. We were walking earlier tonight and I thought we saw a fox out running around— well, walking— and then kind of walked away from us. I don't know if it was a fox, but it was some kind of fox-like looking thing. I couldn't tell, it was a little too far away. All right, I'm gonna do some scribble, um, not scribbly, just kind of simple lines here to say, to show, hey, we have windows on this building. And I'm never sketching to duplicate, I'm sketching to, to just express, you know, what do I feel when I see this building, you know, what kind of vibes am I getting from it. It's not about photorealism at all, that's not my style. It's quick, loose, fast, capture an energy, a vibe of New York City, right? So you can kind of see the copper building happening here. Boom. Uh, we're gonna use blue. I keep wanting to go for the purple, but I don't have it here, so we're gonna go blue on this. And here, I'll show you something that's going to be cool. So I want to give a little bit of depth to this sketch, so throw down this blue, and we're going to take our white pen here and just Add some hatch lines, some diagonal hatching. There you go. That's kind of a real quick sketch of the Copper Building. So let's, let's write it on here. The Copper. I am— I would love to go inside this building. I'd love to go check out this, um, skybridge area. It would be so amazing. It's a residential tower with the copper. So if you know anybody, I'm just saying. No, it's kind of one of my dreams in New York City. I really want to go in here. I really want to go on that, that skybridge. I thought about kind of going to the Copper Building with, you know, taking a sketch and be kind of going into the lobby like, hey, here's a cool sketch I did of this building, and just giving it to whoever's working at the desk there, I guess. Um, that'd be kind of fun. I've done that in a couple places in the city. I've— Dough Donuts, I know a couple of guys that work there now just because I walked in, gave them couple sketches. Um, Shake Shack, I've done that as well, the one down at the end of the High Line down by the Whitney. Um, yeah, I love giving out sketches of Liberty Statue, Liberty torches. So maybe I'll do that with the Copper Mill, just kind of go there and just walk in one day and be like, hey, the copper. And let's put the year, 2026. Awesome. So I'm loving sketching on colored paper. You know, we always think, hey, we have to sketch on white, the black pen. No, I, I— that's a creative, um, mindset that I've been working on breaking this summer especially. And that was really the big switch was going with these Uglybook sketchbooks with the different colored paper. I mean, this has red in it, um, this has like a, like a green, uh, what color would you call that? Chartreuse. This is almost like a chartreuse color, chartreuse inside. I haven't sketched in this one yet, have I? Nope. Um, and some other— there's some bigger size ones as well. But yeah, it's just making that, that shift to the paper color. It's kind of cool to see what kind of effects I can cut— I can play around with, right? Don't, don't be afraid to let sketching, or whatever your art form is, it's, you know, treat it as like a creative playground. I'm combining words. I'm tired. Think of it as a creative playground, a sandbox for you to express ideas, thoughts, emotions, funness, silliness, whatever. I just put in some more lines here on the St. Patrick's Cathedral. I'm starting— I am currently putting together an offer, an opportunity to join me one day in the fall to go and sketch St. Patrick's Cathedral. We'll sketch around Rockefeller Center, maybe we'll jump over to Grand Central Terminal. Be kind of just like a fun afternoon or, or a few hours and I'll do some teaching. We'll, it's kind of, we'll kind of workshop it. It'll be a creative workshop. We'll grab some food, hang out. So stay tuned for that offer. I'll be promoting it pretty soon. All right, cool. So we have the copper, St. Patrick's, bunch of New York City things happening in this one, and other random things like a lighthouse. Um, this lighthouse was fun. I was playing around with to see how color pencils work on this paper, and Um, they work actually really well. Maybe we'll do a little bit of color pencil play before we wrap up here. So I have some colored pencils out. Where the heck are they? Here they are. All right, let's break out some colored pencils and, you know, let's do like a background here on the copper building. Feel free in the comments to say hello, ask Any questions on here? I am here. Obviously I'm here because I'm here. Um, we can zoom out a little bit. There we go. All right, let's break out some colored pencils. What color? I don't know, we'll play around with a bunch of different colors. Maybe we'll try some of that. Of course we gotta use my favorite colored pencil color. Which is light aqua. Oh yeah, this is actually kind of a light aqua marker on this page. Well, let's, let's try the color pencil over here and see if there's a difference. I really like the way the color pencil just kind of glides. It almost, um, almost like melts onto the page, which is really cool. These are, these are Prismacolor Premier color pencils, my favorite ones to use. I just like the way they go down on paper. So there you go, you can kind of see this is a color pencil, this was the marker over here, and I'm purposely leaving just some red showing through. But maybe we'll do a little area here that I just do solid. Let's see what it looks like. Fill in some of the gaps. All right, so this side's kind of more solid and filled, this corner. All right, let's try some other colors. Why the heck not? Um, I love the name of this color, it's called Process Red. Note to self, I need to Google why it's called Process Red. I love the name. Let's see, is the camera going to focus on that? Focus, camera, focus, focus. Nope, it's not going to focus on that. So it's called Process Red. Um, yeah, let's throw some Process Red on here. Why the heck not? I think that's my saying today: why the heck not? Oh man, this color looks really cool on this red paper. Okay, let's kind of overlap it here a little and see what mix we get. Yeah, I kind of like that color. So this is Process Red. Again, pretty cool name. If anybody watching knows why it's called Process Red, let me know. I, I'm so curious. Yeah, this looks really— I wasn't expecting it to look this good on the red. Pretty cool. All right, so we got— we tried Light Aqua, Process Red. We're gonna go with Neon Yellow. Yes, yes we are. Let's throw some maybe on. Yeah, Neon Yellow is not gonna be too amazing on this paper. On the red background, but you don't know until you try, right? So we got some neon yellow. Uh, we're gonna keep this grabbing and going. Chartreuse. Oh yeah, chartreuse is one of my, uh, favorite colors, and I wanted to see the inside of this book, so I thought this was chartreuse inside. They're kind of very similar. But yeah, I really didn't use chartreuse until a couple years ago. I just didn't even really know what the color it was, but now I really— I just love it so much. Let's throw some chartreuse down here. Yeah, this is in the city, so there's really— I don't know if there's any grass or any park areas around this. I think it's right on the— uh, no, there's, there's a little kind of outdoor sitting area here. But you know what, it's our world, we're just having fun, we're throwing down some color. I like the chartreuse on the red, it looks really cool. Should I keep going? Should we try neon orange? Neon orange put next to the yellow, let's see. Oh yeah, the neon orange looks— is coming out. You can definitely see it on that red paper. It's very neon-y. I like— I like— it might be hard to see on camera, but I like the neon orange. It is kind of hard to see on camera. It's right in here. Yeah, in person it looks cool. Aight, aight, what's next? Oh, let's try this one. So these are pretty much my favorite color pencil colors that I'm pulling out of, uh, my Lockbee Quattro here. I love using the Lockbee Quattros for holding my colored pencils, my markers. It's such a really, really cool tool. If you want to learn more about it, check out the link on the bottom of the left screen there. Or it should be in the comments description. theinspiredlife.com/tools, you'll see it. Um, I actually have a Lockbee discount code, 10% off. So yeah, go for it. Their stuff's awesome, love it. All right, this is— oh dang, what do they call this color? I forgot. Sky Blue Light. Sky Blue Light. So we're going to try that on the red here. So that's the Sky Blue Light. It looks, um, it's kind of whitish looking on the red paper. I think, uh, we tried— did we try neon pink on this one? I think we did neon pink on the Lighthouse Tower sketch. I keep saying Lighthouse Tower— the Lifeguard Tower. It's because I love sketching lighthouses. All right, let's throw some neon pink on here. Let's think pink. How's the pink gonna look on the red? Uh, it's actually looking pretty cool. Again, these colors might not be picking up on for you guys with the lighting, but I'll try to post pictures. Yeah, you can't really see it, but the neon pink looks awesome. Muy fantastico, muy fantastico. And we'll go with cream. I like this color. I like, I like it, especially when the word ice is in front of it. Ice cream. Right, ice cream, my favorite, favorite treat. Oh, that point broke. All right, so we have a nice cream color going down. All right, cool. All right, we have the copper. Dun dun dun! I like it. All right, so let's kind of wrap up. What did we work on tonight? We started in our field journal. I just opened up to a page. It had some scribbles on it, some scribbly stuff. This one here. And somehow we pulled a lifeguard— not light— not lighthouse— a lifeguard station out of the scribbles. So that was kind of fun. I want to give a little texture to this. There we go. All right, cool. And looks like it's high tide because the water is coming up to that tower. All right, so we, we did that. That was a fun kind of quick, loosey-goosey warm-up sketch. And then from there, we— from the beaches of California, we went to the East Coast, New York City, and, um, did this really fun little quick sketch of the Copper Building. And I really just wanted to play around with different colors on the red background. And I have to say, I think my favorite, although it's hard for you guys to see, is I like the neon pink on the red. It looks really cool. I actually like the neon orange on the pink. And, and these two colors, I think the— well, light aqua, in my opinion, you can never go wrong with it anywhere. So light aqua, and then the Process Red, it is cool, but I like it kind of blended in here with the aqua. Awesome. All right, um, thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to put them in the chat. Be sure to give it a thumbs up, um, and share it like this wherever you are watching on the medias. Until we meet again, sketch boldly, live creatively, and embrace imperfection.