Sketch Something Thursday - 4/3/2025

Hey, this is Jason Nicholas Nicholas with The Inkspired Life. Happy Thursday night. It is March 3rd, 2025. Not March, April 3rd. I knew something sounded wrong there. This year is flying. Um, I love sketching. I love sketching architecture buildings. I love urban sketching. So if you're new to my channel, welcome. I'm going to be on just for a few minutes tonight. I want to kind of show you, um, block bifolio a little bit, some sketches I did over the weekend, and we'll do maybe a quick lighthouse sketch. I have a workshop coming up this weekend and we're going to be sketching light chops— light chops— lighthouses. Man, I'm tired, and that's okay. One of the reasons I love sketching is it changes my state of mind. It's a great way for me to wind down from a crazy day, a stressful a bad day, right? We all have days like that. Sketching is a great tool, great way for me to change my mindset, um, get refocused, repurposed, re-energized, um, and just change the state of mind, right? All right, so this is the Lochbie folio. Love Lochbie, love their products. This is my own, uh, just my own opinions here, so no one's paying me to say this. This stuff is purchased with my money right here. Um, I finally have had a chance to take it out and about with me. It'll be coming along with me on spring break in a couple weeks as well. I'm loving this folio. It's so cool. And one of the things I love about it is it zippers closed, which is awesome. Um, the zipper is fantastic. It keeps things in, and it's, it's thick. You can fit some decent stuff in here. So I have some Creative Markers in here. I have some field notes going on, and I also have a Soho Sketchbook. And this is what I had with me this weekend for sketching. I had this book with me. I had the markers as well. Has a nice place for a pen or a marker. Keep a Sharpie up there. I also keep an extra pen or Sharpie here as well in the spacious back pockets, and it has really cool pockets on the front as well. So awesome. All right, let's dive in, take a quick look at some of the sketches I've been doing. These are some lighthouses I've been kind of practicing, having fun with for my upcoming workshop. These are some sketches I did on site. I did a hike this past weekend, and during my walk I saw some really cool, like, old— it was an old ski um, not quite a resort, but it was this old ski area, and there's some old relics still hidden around amongst the woods and the ticks. So public service announcement: if you're out, especially up here in Northern New Jersey, if you're out and about walking around in the woods, even in your backyards, just watch out for ticks. They are out in full swing, as I know. I brought at least one home with me. But anyway, so I ventured through the woods, found some cool things to sketch. So this is, uh, this is one of the relics. I don't know exactly what this served, function to serve, some kind of transformer maybe. I don't know, I have to do some research, but it was cool. So I have that sketch, did some other sketches as well. This was a fun sketch I did out there, and I just used the colors I brought with me. So you'll see some really interesting colors like purple trees. I, I just challenged myself to work with whatever I had. So I like to call it grab-and-go creativity. I'm grabbing, going, creating with whatever I have on hand. So hence we have some purple trees and oranges in the background. Uh, I think it's fun. It's kind of a vibrant sketch, symbolizes spring. Spring's here, things are blooming, blossoming, new life is happening. Um, so we have those fun kind of vibrant new life colors. So that was kind of cool. So I figured tonight we'll just do a quick— let's do a lighthouse sketch. Feel free to say hello in the comments, ask me any questions. And let's just sketch for a few minutes. Hopefully the Sharpie works. I'm just gonna sketch a lighthouse. This is kind of from my imagination. Good practice. I have a fun workshop coming up on Zoom this weekend. So when I sketch lighthouses, I like to sketch kind of the main tower part first. Um, notice my sketch is pretty loose, it's wonky, the lines are shaky, and that's intentional. That's just kind of how I like to sketch. I'm flaring this out to give that kind of tapered lighthouse tower look. And then we'll have kind of the glass area here where the light is inside. We'll do a roof, maybe we'll do a Do like a pointed hip style roof on this. Um, this is really interesting. I've noticed I kind of like using Sharpies as the ink dries up in them. So the ink is drying up and it forces me to go back over my lines. And I like the aesthetic of it. It looks really loose and wonky. I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer. Let's see, let's see if this is better. There we go, you can see that a little better now. Um, I just love having to go back over lines. It's kind of making me force the marker down a little bit. It's just creating interest. They're not plain, straight, clean lines, which do serve their own purpose, especially in technical drawings. So when I do architectural blueprints, you know, they're very clean, precise lines. Um, used to draw by hand for many years right out of college. Good old hand drafting, which I miss. I love hand drafting. Everything's on the computer. I was just saying 99.9% of blueprints are probably done on computer now, so we have those— always have that precision that we need when we're creating blueprints for building. But sketching allows a freedom for me, a freedom of expression, the freedom of being wonky and playful. So maybe we have a lighthouse here. We have the lighthouse here, and we have a kind of a lighthouse cottage next to it. Maybe we have a door happening, maybe a cool window over the door. Let's do maybe a round porthole window. This could be that, an attic space. Or a dormered roof area on top of, uh, maybe a second floor attic space. We'll sketch some windows in here. Pretty cool. So the, the windows are loose, they're wonky, they're not beautiful perfect rectangles. I'm just alluding, I'm hinting that we have windows happening on that building. Uh, maybe the building is raised off the ground, so we'll show some steps coming off that door. And then we'll take the lighthouse, continue it down a little bit. Maybe it brings— comes down like that. And maybe our grade, or the ground, does something like this. Maybe it eventually slopes down to the water. Pretty cool, right? And on our lighthouse, maybe we have a window here as you go up the winding circular stair. I love lighthouses. I think they're beautiful, they're functional, they're symbolic. Um, I have been inside a few of them. I love the winding stairs that go up. Just something really special about these buildings. Obviously, some, you know, locations are usually pretty amazing, very epic, with, you know, outcroppings of rock, crashing waves, the sound of seagulls flying around, incoming weather storms on the horizon. Lighthouses conjure up so many images. We have boats, right? Maybe out here we have, uh, I like to do these really kind of loose style kind of sailboats here. Maybe in the distance we have some boats happening. Pretty cool. All right, let's throw on a little bit of color on that. Let me check the chat, see if anybody is on and say hello. Chip's in the house. Hey Chip, great to see you. How are you, man? Lighthouses seem to have their own personality. They have witnessed much over history. If they could speak— 100%. Could you imagine the stories, the tales that lighthouses would be able to tell us? Um, really, really incredible. To think about. Love, I love that. All right, I'm going to break out some Sharpie Creative Markers. Love these markers. They are my— they have entered the top of my list of sketching tools. They're in probably the top 3 right now, one being either my Lockbie Folio or Lockbie Field Journal, obviously with some paper in it. Paper— I'm trying this kraft paper out. I'm kind of liking it. It is thin and bleeds through. Um, also Sharpies, obviously in the top 3, and these are now in the top 3, maybe top 4. We'll add some paper to that. But I, I could spend a whole nother show talking about paper, and I think I did a previous episode if you go back on my videos I think I have one that— I'll maybe I'll link to it here, but I think I have one where I, I talked about some of the papers I like to use. So we're just going to add some color to this quickly tonight, loose, sketchy, wonky. Anybody that's joining me on the virtual workshop Saturday, this is kind of what we'll be doing. I'll be slowing down my process breaking it into steps. We'll do some exercises, and after we do those exercises, we'll end up doing a complete lighthouse kind of sketch. Color is optional. You don't have to add color. You can— it could just be black and white. You could use crayons, markers, watercolors, whatever you want. It's really very open and kind of flexible. And we can just use— I love, I love the look of the white on top of this kraft paper. I think it really has a nice look to it. And we'll make the door of the Lighthouse Cottage kind of white as well. Maybe we have some white trim around there. I'm gonna break out my favorite. This is my favorite color, whether it's colored pencil, creative marker, or watercolor. We have, um, they don't have the name of the color on here. It's— I call it, uh, it's like an aqua color, turquoise aqua. Look how that just pops off that brown paper. It's like magic. I love that aesthetic so much. Let's throw some up here as well. That is really magical. Um, let's see, I'm going to add I want to make the lighthouse tower look round— roundish. Let's try using this gray. See if I could do it with the gray marker and just add some kind of hatch lines coming down. Usually I do this with a black, but I'm just playing around, see what it looks like in gray. And I want to pop out these windows. Um, let's use yellow. Let's just pop these out. Maybe there's some lights happening inside. Maybe it's getting dark out, so we'll just pop some yellow in here. Let's see, what should we do? The ground. Again, I'm just doing grab-and-go creativity, grab-and-go creation, using what's right in front of me. I'll be traveling in a couple weeks, um, which is going to be amazing. Going to see some really inspiring people and doing some working, some sketching, shooting, um, some video footage for my sketching stuff. So I need to think about what am I going to travel with, what am I going to pack, and I want to keep it as light as possible. So I'll put together a video and show you guys what I'm going to travel with, but definitely the Lockbie Folio will be coming with me. Creative markers, Sharpie, and that might be it actually. I might just travel with those ingredients— I almost said ingredients— those creative ingredients, creative tools. There you go. I'm just throwing down some lines on top of that, that gray, add a little bit of texture. Maybe we have some vertical wood, wood siding on this cottage here. Throw a window on the door here. When you start adding these layers, these little details, it starts taking your sketch to just a different level. I kind of like the way it's looking. I'm going to show maybe a stone base on this building. So let's sketch some stones on here. We have like a stone base across the bottom, a foundation. Let's do some vertical lines on the steps. Just to give the illusion that there's a stair face happening. And I'm going to actually pull out— I think I have a black marker. Yeah, let's use the black Creative Marker and just pull out some of these shapes a little bit more bold, more boldly. We're boldly gonna sketch where no one has sketched before. Boldly sketch where no one has sketched before. All right, start— I don't know why, but Star Trek literally just popped into my mind when I was sketching. So I'm going back over some of these things and just pulling out some of these shapes a little bit. More, just so they pop a little bit. Maybe we'll just scribble down here. Maybe we have some, um, some rocks happening here. My pup is behind me. She's on the chair. She's snoring. She's so cute back there. I brought a chair in here maybe a few weeks ago, and then she started coming in here and hanging out on it, and I love that. I, I didn't know that would happen. It was like a bonus. I was just looking for a little a nice comfy chair to sit down in— sit down in— sit down on in my office, or studio space rather. All right, cool. Yeah, I have to do it. It might be cheesy, but I gotta— I'm gonna show some seagulls in the sky. And I feel like doing— hmm, yeah, I feel like putting like a chimney on here somewhere. Maybe we got a chimney coming up Kind of at the top of this cottage, maybe we'll do some bricks on it. Cool. Move it over there. Cool. Uh, they're very cool. There you go. I kind of like it. It's just a, um, wonky lighthouse, little cottage from my imagination, playing around with different colors, Sharpie, and even has some seagulls. All right guys, so again, I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with The Inkspired Life. I love sketching architecture, love buildings. Um, I'm an architect by trade. And I teach architecture at the high school level, so it's kind of in my blood. I love design, and I love, um, carrying my sketchbook wherever I go and sketching the beautiful, wonky, crazy, industrial— it doesn't matter, just capturing the world around me, the built environment around me, um, with my Sharpie and a sketchbook. Thank you for watching. I appreciate y'all so much. I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. Feel free to leave comments, questions. I'll come back and revisit this, and you too can sketch architecture one line at a time. Hope to see you on the next episode. Be sure to like and subscribe and all that fun social media jazz. Let's get the work out. Let's spread positivity through creativity. Peace out. Appreciate you guys so, so much. See you soon.