Sketch Something Saturday - 05.25.25

Hey, happy Saturday! I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with The Inkspired Life. I love sketching architecture and urban sketching and sketching irises. So, uh, tonight I thought I'd pop on and, um, my irises are blooming. I love them so much, so I thought I would do a sketch maybe and Maybe we'll do some watercolor as well. Uh, we'll see how it goes. Anyway, let me know where you're watching from. Hope you're having a great, great day today. Cool. Let me just put some music on here. All right, awesome. So, happy Memorial Day weekend. Hope you're having a great holiday weekend. Hope you're also taking time in a moment out just to remember all of those that have served for us. So, we're very fortunate, very blessed to have had those people out there Uh, you know, fighting and protecting and standing for our country, right? Uh, freedom. So thank you and shout out again. Our hearts go out to all of those that have served and shout out to those that are currently serving. Cool. All right, so let's do some iris sketching. I'm also live on TikTok. Yes, that's interesting. So, uh, hopefully we'll see how that goes. So feel free, let me know where you're watching from. I'm trying to see if I can see my live feed. If you're on TikTok, I'm sorry, I can't really see the feed, so I don't know who's out there watching right now, and that's okay. But I do appreciate all watching so, so much. So about 2 weeks ago I did this. Let me show you to you. I did this iris sketch, and it's a watercolor and ink mixed media piece. I really love the way it came out, so I cut it out of this piece of paper. And here's, here's why I cut it out. Um, here's the original, and as I was working on it, I was messing around with the ink, and I had these kind of yellow orange splatters. I didn't really like the way it was looking, so I said, all right, let me cut that out. Boom. So I cut it out, and then to make it look even more cool, I put it on black paper. And then I'm like, oh, you know what, that looks really cool. The black background really makes the colors pop. So I took this kind of frame I have, this matte, matted frame, and I was playing around with it, and I like this effect here. So I like the way this iris looks kind of coming out of the matte. It gives a little bit of 3D to it. It's a really cool effect. I had never done that before, so, um, I was inspired to maybe do it again. So tonight, um, let's, let's sketch an iris. Here's what I have with me. So these are kind of my tools that I like to use when I'm doing my iris sketches. So 140-pound watercolor paper right there. Then of course, to do the sketch, I have the Sharpie. Gotta love the Sharpie. So we have paper, the Sharpie, and I like using for my purple a Pilot Varsity pen. So that bleeds really well. If you look at the purple on this, that's mostly the Varsity pen. Also the pink on here, the pink is a mix. It's Varsity pen and I also have some pink colored pencil on here as well, and I have some watercolor. And for watercolor, I mostly use the green for the, uh, kind of the stem on here. So that is essentially what I'm going to be using to do my iris painting. My irises that are growing here are Amazing. They're a real dark purple, almost black color. I'll post some pictures for you guys at some point so you can see them. My most favorite flower. Awesome. Hey, I see Janice is in the house on Facebook. Janice, how are you? Hope you're doing well. It's always great to see you. Very, very cool. Oh man, so I got the TikTok going. I'm watching it on my computer, but I don't know, is there a way to see the comments? Let me know. Anyway, shout out to anybody watching on TikTok. I appreciate you guys so, so much. Cool stuff. All right, let's do some sketching. So I'm gonna just keep this really loosey-goosey. And this is just an outline. One of the reasons I love sketching flowers is no two flowers are ever the same. And I've only really sketched irises, and I've done, um, what else have I sketched? Roses, I think. I don't really do too many botanical or floral sketch paintings, but that's okay. It's not my wheelhouse yet, but I do love doing them when I do. So it's good to switch things up sometimes, right? So this is kind of the rough outline, and we have the stem happening. This is just step number one, just kind of laying out some rough lines on this. I think that's good just to start with. So we have our outline of the iris happening, which is pretty cool. Give a shout out to Janice, is doing fine. That's great, Janice. It's so awesome to see you as always. We have on TikTok, looks like I see Tim and Eagle out there, Josue. Sorry if I'm saying the names wrong on TikTok, guys. Um, screen's really small. All right, so now that we have our outline, let's throw down some ink on this. This is kind of the really fun part. So I have my Varsity pen, and then I also have some water and a paintbrush, and we're going to bleed some of this. So to start with, I'm just going to come on here and just throw down some purple of the Varsity pen. Put my paintbrush in some water and I'm just going to let it bleed. So we're going to just bleed that ink. And one of the cool things about the Varsity pens is I just love the way the ink will travel with the water. So you can kind of see what's happening there, and I'll just come around and add some more in places. This kind of sketch painting is about, about layers, adding layers. I will not get it all done tonight. I'll just kind of tap it in some places. I may have to stock up on, uh, some of these pens. I don't know, I don't know if I have any backup ones. You know what we might try? I'm gonna— let me do this. I'm gonna break out a purple highlighter and let's see what happens if we throw a highlighter on here. I just love the way that ink kind of bleeds. So cool. I'm not covering every single space you see on here and all the white space. I'm leaving a lot of it open. And that's intentional. It just adds a lot of variety, um, and interest. If I, if I colored everything solid purple— well, that would— look at the way that bled! That was so cool. If I color everything solid purple, it would just be boring. So this allows some variation to happen. Yeah, I like that. And what I might do before I grab a highlighter, let me throw some pink on here. So this is a pink Preppy pen— I'm sorry, it's a Varsity pen, not Preppy. And I like the color combination of the pink happening with that purple. You know, I don't get too crazy with the pink, and I think that's good enough for the pink for now. So let me know what you guys think. Do you think this is kind of cool or not really? I'd love to know your thoughts. Shout out to everybody watching on TikTok, hope you're doing well. And YouTube, if anybody's on YouTube, hi, great to see you. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook. All the socials are happening right now. All right, I'm going to pull out a highlighter just for the heck of it. I have not used a highlighter on an iris painting yet, but let's see what happens. Let's just throw some on here. I think this highlighter is running out of— it's running out of juice here, so might not really— yeah, all right, so this highlighter is kind of shot, so there goes that idea. Um, I'll try it again at a future point in time. You know what I do have? I have a, I have a creative marker right here. Let's try a purple Sharpie creative marker. Hey D-Ray, I see D-Ray over on Facebook. How are you? Good to see you, hope all's well. All right, so this is a Sharpie creative marker. And this can get really kind of intense purple, but I'm going to bleed it a little bit. So you can, you can bleed, bleed the Creative Markers, but you got to do it right away. They dry very quickly. So it just created kind of a cool outline with it. So there you go. So that's kind of what the, what the purple marker looks like. I'm going to bleed some more purple, and then, um, we'll let the kind of the flower part here dry, and then I'll come down to the stem and we'll grab some— let me grab some— I think it's Sap Green. So we're going to grab some Sap Green watercolor paint and we'll do some of the stem area. T-Ray says dip it in water if it's a water-based marker. Yes, exactly. Hello, TikTok watchers! Sorry I can't see your names right now, but I do appreciate you watching. Feel free to, uh, Leave a comment. Wait, can you comment? Can you— this is my second time live streaming on TikTok. Can you leave comments on a live stream? I have no idea. If you can, hey, leave me a comment. I'm also streaming on YouTube if you want to come over to YouTube. Just go to YouTube, look for The Inkspired Life. That's me. Inkspired. I-N-K-S-P-I-R-E-D. Life. Some people put inspired. I'm not— I am inspired, but my name is Inkspired. All right, so this is just some sap green. You see right here is some watercolors, and sap green is probably my favorite green to use for any kind of landscaping. And I don't know if you notice what I did, but I just kind of threw the, um, water down here on this edge, and then I let the watercolor kind of run down the page. I want to keep the left side of that stem kind of highlighted a little bit. So there you go, that looks kind of cool. Hey, Linda's in the house! Great to see you, hope all's well. Always good to see you. All right, so like I said, this is going to be multi-layers. We're going to let it dry for a minute. While it's drying, let me show you— break out the one I did again. Um, I think 2 weeks ago. So here's the one I did 2 weeks ago. You can see that sap green on the stem. Um, also let me show you what else I use. Do I have my colored pencils? I do. All right, so in my colored pencil thing, um, this is one of my favorite colors to use as far as greens go, and it's chartreuse. Oh yeah, heck, I didn't even know what chartreuse was until, I don't know, 2 or 3 years ago, and I actually love it. It's a great, great color. Do you guys have your hair dryer handy? I, I do have my little dryer thing here, actually, now that you mention it. Let's do it. And this is just a fun kind of practice play piece. All right, warning, warning, I am gonna use my little dryer. This is a vacuum slash like duster thing, it works really good. So let's turn it on, let's kind of dry it a little bit if it's charged. Kind of like that purple splash up there. That's cool. Thanks, D-Ray, for the idea. That was awesome. I didn't even think about using it. I hardly use this thing for watercoloring. All right, that's done. Pretty cool, right? Linda's like, chartreuse! I know, Linda, right? It's such a great, great color. Um, let me add— I don't know, we'll come back and add some Sharpie details if it's dry enough. Kind of need more space on my desk area here. Okay, cool. All right, let's see if I can just add some, some more, uh, some more Sharpie on here, just add some details. Sharpies don't like to write on wet areas. I do have a Sharpie gel pen somewhere I could use if I wanted to pull that out. So I like to come back over the ink And I'm sorry, the watercolor, and just throw some detail lines on there. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop down some more purple. There you go. So I'm just tapping the pen on that wet area to let the ink kind of do its thing. Hey, I see Grace over on Instagram. Hi Grace, hope you're doing well. Thanks for recently, um, following me. I appreciate that. So cool. I love when you guys follow and like my videos, my live streams. It just pumps me up to keep doing this stuff, which I love. This is like my therapy. It fires me up, it calms me down, it makes my creative juices flow, helps me to brainstorm, think more clearly. For me, sketching is— yeah, it does all that stuff. I know it sounds weird. It's meditative. It's It amps me up, right. We all have something in our lives that we like doing that can change our state of mind, change our state of being. And this is definitely one of them for me. Just like music. Music I love so much. One of the things I wish, one of the things I want to learn to do at some point is I would love to I want to learn to play the guitar. I want to learn how to write a song and I want to be able to sing that song. That's kind of a bucket list thing for me. One of these days. I am not musically inclined at all. I mess around with GarageBand, that GarageBand app. I can make some music on there, but I just want to be able to Yeah, that'd be so cool. So anybody that's musically talented out there, I'm envious. Check that out. Oh man, I'm loving how this ink is just kind of working its wonder there. Pretty cool. Hey, Gert Loves Architecture, great to see you. Are you geeked or locked in? Yes, both. I'm geeking out on this stuff because I love it. And I'm locked in. It's so fun to geek out into things in life we love. I'm feeling— I'm feeling I'm way too— being way too tight with this drawing, too, um, thinking about it too much. This sketch, I want to be more loose, so you might see me just kind of scribbling some lines here. This is more my aesthetic is this loose scribbly kind of sketching whether it's architecture or flowers. Linda says, come visit Mr. Sliding, we'll teach you to play guitar. Oh my God, Linda, I might have to take you up on that sometime. It's, it's, it's actually a dream of mine, to believe it or not. Um, I have a student, she's offered to teach me to play guitar. Um, I might have to take her up on that. All right, let's throw some more pink on here. The flower is so pretty. Oh, thank you so much, I appreciate that. Thanks, Grace. Guys, hope you're having a great day. Happy Sunday. Hopefully you're off tomorrow for the holiday weekend. I'm so lucky to be off tomorrow and Tuesday. Our school gave us a snow day back, so I got a bonus day on Tuesday, which is awesome. Maybe we'll see how much stuff I get done tomorrow, but maybe part of me wants to go, uh, to NYC on Tuesday. I'm hanging— I'm kind of— I don't know where I want to go. Next Saturday I think I'm going to be in the Brooklyn area sketching one of my favorite buildings, the Domino Sugar Factory. All right, so I'm just throwing some pink on here now. All right, I feel like I need some yellow, so let's break out— we're gonna dip into the watercolor. I'm gonna grab some yellow watercolor right here. Boom! Hey, Karen's in the house on Facebook! Great to see you, hope all's well. All right, so I am dipping into the yellow watercolor paint. Hello to everybody watching on TikTok. Hope you're doing great in TikTok land. I'm giving a general shout out to my TikTokers because I, I can't see the screen and I can't see names. All right, so I just, I'm just popping some yellow on here. I feel like, let me zoom in a little bit. Sorry guys at home, I should be zooming in closer. I think that's better. Oh yeah. My favorite yellow color is like a lemon yellow. I like to think of it as adding zest. Like, you know, when you cook with lemon and use lemon zest, it kind of adds that brightness to the whatever you're eating. Well, for me, That's what the lemon watercolor paint does. It adds that zest. Here I threw it on kind of thick over there. Monica Scott joined on Instagram. Hey Monica, hope you're well. Hey, anybody on Instagram, let me know in the comments. Uh, I don't know what it looks like on your end. Can you see my entire flower or just a small section? So let me know. I'm always curious to know what you guys are seeing on Instagram. All right, look at that yellow. Oh, that yellow looks really cool. Let's throw some on the stem. I don't want to overdo it. I'm going to zoom in. I want to show you what's happening here because it looks really awesome. Zoom time. Here comes the zoom cam. I'm gonna zoom in. Do you guys check this out? Look, look at where the yellow and the purple are meeting, and look at the line running down there. That looks pretty awesome. Jira says better. Oh, thank you so much. Hey Karen, thank you for sending me star. I appreciate that. You guys are awesome. Let's see, that looks really amazing. This might be a— this might be a wrap for tonight. Because I want this to dry. Actually, no, I do want to do one more thing tonight. I kind of want to dry it the way it is. I don't want to— and I don't use a hair dryer because I don't want to move all this, this paint around. I kind of want to let it dry as where it's sitting. So, but what I do want to do is I want to— oops. I want to throw down some more of that sap green onto the stem. Hey, Karen says lovely blending. Hey, thanks Karen, I appreciate that. All right, we're gonna move this up and you guys can just see. I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. I'm gonna work on the stem area. There we go. And I just want to pop out— let me grab some of that Sap Green and just want to, just want to darken it in some areas there. Pretty cool, right? Also notice that when I'm— when I am throwing down color, sometimes I'm just dabbing it down in the wet areas, kind of just dabbing my brush. Dab, dab, dab, dab, dab. That's, that's my dab sound effect. Um, we got some splatters there, that's cool. So dab, dab, dab, dab. Um, instead of brushing it on, you know, brush strokes, I like dabbing it, letting it pool up, let the water do its magic and kind of pull it down the page a little bit. Um, I always do my watercolors at a and ink washes at an angle, uh, the paper is at an angle so gravity can pull things down. I like the way that looks. Um, another thing you might notice is I didn't bring that green all the way down here. I stopped it. That adds variety, variation. It's not consistent. It's not a nice clean brush stroke of color all the way down. It's kind of when I talk about sketching with different line types, I have a line type I call Morse code or dash dot lines, not a solid line, but it kind of a— you draw, stop, draw, stop, draw, stop. So I do the same thing in my, my ink and watercolor washing. It's like a Morse code brushstroke, so to speak, right? I have it continuous, stop, continuous, stop, and I kind of do that along the page. It kind of creates that loose style I like. Pretty awesome. All right, let's zoom out and then we'll take a look at the whole thing and we'll wrap up for tonight. Um, get a quick drink of water here. All right, let me zoom out a little bit. All right, there we go. And that's what it's looking like. So this is iris painting number 2 of the season. Um, number 1 is here. Irises are in full bloom outside. Oh my gosh, beautiful. I've been taking pictures and some videos. I'm kind of obsessed with them, um, but I'll be posting pictures and some videos to show you guys what they look like. All right, let me see if there's any final questions or comments. Let me know in the chat before I head out. Karen says pretty. Thank you so much, love that. Also, if, if, if anybody's interested, this, this one is available. This one is available, um, for purchase. Let me know if you're interested in it. Just send me a message, or yeah, send me a message or leave me a comment on the stream and let me know. I'll be more than happy to send this your way. Um, I will— I'll be gluing it onto the black background. And then— sorry, TikTok world, I just hit the phone. I just shook the TikTok world up by hitting the phone. Um, and then I have this mat here as well that I could— I would sell it like this. Okay, so let me know if you're interested. Please let me— leave me a comment or send me a DM. And we can talk about it. Oh, let me put this over here. All right, all right guys, I think that's a wrap for tonight on this one. Thank you so much for watching. I appreciate you tuning in, whether you're watching live or the replay. Um, feel free to— I would love for you to like this, hit that like button, and subscribe to my channel or channels if you haven't yet. Um, yeah, I know I am now on TikTok as well. I'm not dancing, I'm not doing crazy stupid things there. I'm just creating art. All right guys, keep using your creativity for positivity, and remember, you too can sketch the world around you, whether it's architecture or flowers. One line at a time. All right, I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with The Inkspired Life. I will see you soon. Enjoy the rest of your day. Have an amazing Memorial Day holiday tomorrow. Peace out.