The (INK)spired Life - Architectural Sketching

Architect Jason Nicholas sketches three NYC landmarks—the Empire State Building, Chelsea Market skybridge, and Copper Building—with ink and markers, sharing his philosophy of prioritizing recognizability over perfection. He discusses paper texture, pen choices, and why embracing the "ugly-duckling phase" matters for creative growth.
Chapters
Hey everybody, hope you're doing well on this Wednesday night. What day is it? I think it's Wednesday. Hope you're doing well. I'm gonna change the setting here. Just give me a second. Let's turn it up. Boom. All right, I was hearing myself talk, which was really strange. Hope you guys are doing well. Happy Wednesday, October 7th, 11th, 11th. I am so off with my schedule. I'm so sorry. But yeah, let's— I'm going to do a sketch tonight. It's Inktober. I'm not following all the Inktober prompts that are out there. I'm just popping on like I normally do. And but I am kind of focusing on New York City architecture sketches. So yeah, let's do a sketch tonight. I'm going to zoom in a little bit and let me know how you're doing. Let me know if you can hear me and all that fun jazz. So I'm going to sketch a building. Let's see if you guys can actually guess what I'm sketching. It's going to be just kind of quick, fast here, and it's only going to be part of a building. I'm not going to fit the whole thing. On this sheet of paper, and that's fine. It kind of comes back here, just kind of steps up in here a little bit. We have this part of the building that pops down and brings across. So October is here in New Jersey, the Fall is here. I love the leaves changing color, and apparently Olivia, my pup, she really loves the fall. She's out there having fun, watching the leaves fall, chasing the leaves, smelling everything. So it's really cool just to, um, kind of see and experience the fall through her eyes. This is her first fall. She'll be 1 year old, um, Gosh, October 19th is her birthday. How cool is that? But hey, Linda's in the house. Linda, good to see you. Hope all's well. Linda is in the house as always over on the YouTube side of things, so I appreciate you watching on YouTube. That's fun. It's been fun watching the YouTube subscriptions, subscriber has been going up, so that's cool. Awesome, awesome. And you guys are all helping to make that possible, so I do appreciate it so much. Hope you guys are getting a little something out of these sketch sessions, you're having some fun, you're learning some things, maybe you just like to hang out in a nice positive atmosphere. And I just think it's really a great place. I love coming on here and sketching and getting your feedback and just seeing what you guys are chatting about. So keep up the positivity. It's, it's just amazing. So this is part of an iconic NYC building. Maybe you guys can identify. I'm not going to say what it is yet. Jason already said it. Hey Jason, good to see you. Yes, this is the Empire State Building. I am so glad that you identified it. So that means I'm doing a good job. Just like I tell my students in my architecture classes, when you're sketching buildings, like iconic buildings, the idea is just to, um, if somebody can, if someone can identify the building you're sketching, you've done your job. We're not going for perfection. We're not going for photorealistic sketches. So that's so cool, cool, man. You guys are all doing well? Let me know if you can hear me okay. My mic I bought, the microphone I bought like about a month ago, Apple, when Apple just did their new update, they're not supporting this new microphone I have. So I am right now using the built-in iMac microphone. Hopefully it's coming working out okay. So I'm just going to add a little bit of shading, kind of scribbly or hatching here, just give a little bit of depth. I'm not going to count all the windows in the building, but we're just going to do some vertical. If you look at the Empire State Building, it's a very vertical structure. So it kind of has a line of windows coming here, another line kind of happening Some lines here as well, and I'll pop out some of these. You'll see what I mean, just to give a little more detail. But I, I love the Empire State Building. It is iconic for a reason because it's a spectacular Art Deco style building. When you're in New York City, you could see this building from really far locations. It definitely stands out. I just— and when you see in person, it just blows your mind. I can't get enough of this building and walking around it and just getting different views of it. It's just so real, real cool. It's everything you think it is. And more. I'm just kind of pull these out a little bit here. I'm just going to shade this in. Again, just create a little bit of depth maybe going on here. I was supposed to time my Inktober sketches to 10 minutes. I forgot to set the timer. That's okay. Pretty cool, right? Hey, Nan's Life's in the house. Hello, are you sketching Empire State Building? I am. Excellent guess. I love that you, you, um, said that. Linda says, I hear you just fine. That's cool. You guys are awesome. My daughter lost her first tooth there. Oh, that's so cool. She lost her first tooth at the Empire State Building. Pardon me while I drink some, uh, cold Café Coffee. That is so cool. That's definitely a memory to cherish, right? So I'm going to indicate some windows on this building. All I'm going to do— I'm just doing this for windows. If I zoom in close, I'll show you. I'm not even drawing rectangles or squares. They're actually more like the number 7, and I'm just randomly going to put them in some places just to give a little bit of detail. It's just a quick kind of shorthand way of indicating windows on the facade of a building. There are many, many more than I'm sketching. But my goal is not to count every window and draw every window, which is to capture the feel of the windows. Hopefully that makes sense. I'm actually going to even do some vertical hatching on here, just to give it a little bit. The Empire State Building is such a vertical building. And it has the iconic piece on the top, the spire up here, which was theoretically supposed to be a mooring station for dirigibles, for blimps. There was an— there was a time when they were thinking about actually docking blimps to the building, and they would kind of moor themselves or tie them off at the top here. How cool is that for some history, right? I love blimps. I used to actually sketch blimps a lot, um, in my cityscapes. Yeah, so this is looking cool. I'm just gonna pull out some lines a little bit darker, so I'm gonna go over them. Just kind of pull out the edge maybe. So I'm sketching on— this is the kind of paper I'm using right here, 1264 Fabriano. It's watercolor paper. I like the texture. I like the roughness of my Sharpie on here. You can see the texture. And the texture helps to create even a looser style sketch because the ink is kind of skipping over those bumps. So, the lines look broken up. They're not really solid in a lot of places. So, I use that texture of the paper to go with the, um, the loose style of sketching, which is really cool.
What else?
Let's see. I want to maybe do a little bit of shading here. I wonder why King Kong decided to climb this building. Did you ever think about that? Cool, looks good. Linda says everyone around us clapped. Oh, that's so cool. What a memory. So this is my Empire State Building. I wasn't able to fit the whole building on here, and that's cool. I'll do that with a lot of sketches. I won't even try to fit the whole building. I just want to do a portion of it, and it's awesome you could ID it without the whole building. So thank you so much for doing that. All right, let's— let's— maybe we'll do another sketch. Let's see, trying to keep these together. So this is, this is actually in the Princeton Chapel. You guys may have seen me do this sketch live here. And then we have this iconic— and let me just write on here what it is. He signs Bad Boy. So let's put a heart and I'll put my name, Jason, and then I'll put the month, 10, and then the year, 23, and I'll just put it in a box here. So I'm just kind of signing this here, and I'll just put here the ESB. That's the cool way of saying Empire State Building, ESB. Awesome! I just did my homework for the week. My sketching homework. My students are sketching, um, they can sketch anything they want architecture this week for their sketchbook assignment. And I do happen to know some of them did pick the Empire State Building. So I'll be able to show them my kind of sketch and play back some of the video for them. Which will be cool. Alright, awesome! Love it, love it. That's a fun, quick Empire State Building right there. Let me know if you guys have any questions or comments as I'm sketching. Let's see, let me do another NYC building. I actually have my photos open. I have around 2,000 photos of New York City. I'm sure I have more somewhere as well. Let me see, I'm gonna go and sketch. I want to sketch, hmm, uh, actually maybe we'll sketch this. I'll show it on screen. This is a cool skybridge in, where is this, Chelsea Market. So this is Chelsea Market with the Skybridge. So let's just do a little vignette of this maybe. So I'm gonna close it and I'm gonna open it here. All right, let's do a little sketch of this. This will be interesting because I'm doing it on this narrow piece of paper. Hey, you guys are awesome! Thank you for just joining me. Happy Wednesday! Um, Linda says, oh, I love your Jacks. Oh yeah, I have my Jacks. Here's my Jack Skellington mug. Can you see it? This is Jack Skellington. I'm a huge Nightmare Before Christmas fan. I don't want to spill it. Um, you can see I have powdered— what's that powdered Coffee Mate stuff? I love it. It's decaf. It's good. I'm a huge Nightmare Before Christmas fan and a Tim Burton and Danny Elfman fan. Nightmare Before Christmas is— I love the architecture in that movie. The buildings are just so Tim Burton-ish, just so wonky. One I've had, one of my dream careers was to, to have been in the movies. I would love to have been done like set design or even the model building for movies. I thought that would have been such a cool career. So that's one path I didn't go down. I was always fascinated by these movies that have all these cool miniatures and cool model set designs. A Nightmare Before Christmas is awesome. I got to actually see an exhibit years ago at Disney. They had all the models on display and the whole, um, Halloween Town on display. It was so awesome to see the actual set they used. It was huge. Really fun stuff. You know, another thing would have been like a concept artist, a storyboard art— storyboard artist. I can't talk today. Artist would have been fun as well, designing this, the locations. I guess it's a production designer, maybe. In my next life, I'll do that. I'm sketching this kind of quick, so I'm actually thinking too much about this instead of just sketching. And the more I think about things when I sketch, the more I just get held back. I know that sounds weird, but I can't really— I can't think about sketching it. Like, I'm already feeling this is kind of wonky and not looking like I want it to. 'cause I was thinking too much about it. It's just the way my brain works. My brain is like, it just wants to go, just go with the flow and keep moving and not thinking too, too much. So that's just for me. Everybody's different, and maybe it just takes practice over the years just to kind of not wing it, but just to draw and let things happen. There's nothing wrong with planning and thinking and laying everything out where you want it to, but my brain kind of goes really fast when I'm doing this stuff. Hopefully that makes sense. Let's just add some shading. I mean, we'll get this to a place where it looks kind of cool. I'm not worried about that. This skybridge is pretty awesome. It has these nice arched windows on it. It's an iconic piece of architecture for sure. Have you ever been to the Chelsea Market? I was there for the first time. Back in April. It's a real beautiful kind of old brick industrial buildings in Chelsea. So I'm sketching these lines here to indicate the brick on the buildings. You can see as I add more line work and details, it's actually starting to pull together into a nice looking loose style sketch. For me, I would say all of my drawings and sketches have an ugly, ugly duckling phase where I kind of just don't like it. But then you keep working on it and things come together. So don't give up if you're at that point in your drawing, painting, or sketching and it's looking kind of— you don't like it. You could step away, come back to it, but I would say don't give up on it because it'll get past that kind of wonky— I call it the ugly duckling phase— and it'll start to come into play, it'll take shape, something, some fun things will happen. Just gotta kind of be patient with it. Sometimes we want instantaneous results because our brain can maybe picture what we want the end to look like and we're not patient enough to get there. Just, you guys, just take a breath and give yourself a little bit of time, permission to step away and come back. There you go. I kind of like— see, I kind of like where it's headed now. Hey, let's look at the comments. Jason Nicholas said When was that built? Oh, um, oh, Jason, I'm so sorry, I'm not sure what we're talking about. Empire State Building, it was built in the 1930s. The SkyBridge, really great question. I would have to Google it because I don't know when the SkyBridge was built. Hey, Karen's in! Happy Wednesday! Happy Wednesday to you, Karen, great to see you. Linda says, ditto, love that movie. Yeah, right, Nightmare Before Christmas. Awesome, awesome. Jason said worked on Slippery Deathmatch and worked at Epcot on a few rides trying to get into Disney Imagineering. Hey Jason, that's awesome. Yeah, Disney Imagineering, that is, that is on my career list of things I wanted to do for sure. That was probably in the top 3 3, if not the top 2. I always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer. I'm gonna add some hatching here to give depth. Or like I said, a movie set designer, production designer. And then my real stretch dream career, and it's something I still would love to do, was to have been a talk show host, like old school Johnny Carson talk show host. I have always had a dream, secret dream, to be a talk show host. I know that sounds weird, but it's true. And I'm, and I'm talking old school.
Cool.
I'm kind of liking this, guys. Hey, Arrosetzin, got the right music for speed, intense sketching. That's so cool. I'm not sure what was playing at the time, but, um, yeah, you guys know I love music, right? You guys are amazing. I love watching because of your energy and movement, the flow of freedom of it. It helps me every time I see you. That is so cool. I thank you for saying that. I really, I love that. I love that. I love the freedom of flow. That just sounds so cool. Sometimes you just have to let yourself go, guys, when we're sketching. This is kind of cool. I like it. I like it. I like it. And here's our Empire State Building, right? So we got— we did two kind of New York City city sketches. Should we go for third one? Let's do one more. We'll do one more sketch. Maybe I'll do it on the back. Oh, if I can tear that off. You guys are awesome. Thank you for your beautiful comments, your friendliness. Um, I do appreciate you all so much. And I see Dirk G. Dirk, how are you? Dirk, hopefully it's going well. I missed our friend Sifa tonight. I hope you're doing awesome. All right, let's do another iconic NYC, or maybe not even iconic. Let's find a New York City— hmm, I don't know. I'll show you a picture. I'll bring it on screen. What do I want to sketch? The Copper Building. I love the Copper Building. Let's visit it again. I've sketched it a bunch of times. I never get tired of this building. I'll bring it on screen. Here we are. I love the copper building. It looks like the letter H. It represents like two people dancing. It is actually clad in copper. I can't say enough about this building. It is— when I saw it in person, I got goosebumps. I am dying to get inside this building. It's— I've seen pictures online. It's an incredible facility. Right along the East River. The ferry station is literally like right— I actually took the picture from the ferry station looking at the building. So that's where I am standing in this photograph here. But let's sketch the Copper Building. And every time I sketch it, it's a little different. And that's why I love sketching architecture and being wonky with it, because I'm not recreating what I'm seeing. I'm just putting different spins on it. Right. And let's actually even do something different. Let's break out a different pen. I've been sketching with my Sharpie as always. I'm going to grab a— you know, I'm going to grab— I'm going to actually sketch this with an old school purple flare pen. Is it old school? Yeah, I have an old school purple flare pen right here. This— these pens are an architect's dream. I guess they're more like markers. So these markers are architect's dream. They don't make this style anymore. If you listen, listen to this. I don't know where my microphone is because I'm using my Mac one. Let's see if you can hear it. The barrel of the pen has these really cool ridges on it. I don't know if the camera's focusing. But yeah, let's just sketch with this purple Flair pen. This was actually kindly given to me by our friend, if you guys know Roo or Michael Hong, he's an amazing mentor of mine. A great, great friend. He's an incredible watercolor and artist. He sketches roosters mostly. Really cool guy. He actually gave me some Flair pens. Let's do some sketching. Oh my God, this is like a treat using the Flair pen. If you've used them, you'll know what I'm talking about. I don't know how old this— this is probably a pretty old pen here. And I know I keep saying pen. I guess it really is a felt tip marker. Cool. So we got this building has this kind of crooked— I think I— let me put the picture back on screen. I'll just make it smaller so you can kind of see what I'm sketching. There you go. There you go. So we got the crooked piece at the top coming down. And then we have— this is really iconic. It has this amazing skybridge. I'm a huge skybridge fan. I think they're amazing. Just such a cool concept, right? Connecting these buildings together. We got our skybridge kind of here. This building kind of comes here. My scale's off a little bit. That's fine. Again, we're not trying to recreate exactly what we're seeing. That's too much pressure. So guys, if you want to take the pressure off of sketching architecture, don't try to sketch exactly what you're seeing. That's too much pressure. Make it your own loose style. Make it whatever color you want. Right? I think that's part of my— I guess my secret is I'm not stressing about recreating this thing. I know I sound like a broken record. This kind of really comes down like this. Boom. Here, he's here. We're actually going to end up just hatching some of this in. Kind of see the H shape, right, happening. Just like the Empire State Building, we're not going to draw all the windows. We have some vertical pieces coming down. This, we kind of come in like this, kind of going down like this. And we're actually going to bleed some of this ink to I'm gonna add some water and I'll show you how this pen bleeds. Just add some— cool. Alright, let's bleed some ink on this and have fun. Let me just grab a— I think I'm just going to grab— I have an Aqua brush here, actually, because it's kind of ink in it. Let's see what happens. So look at how fun this is when I start bleeding this ink. I love that color, right?
Isn't that fun?
Bleeding ink is a really Great way to kind of keep your— the loose look going. If you haven't used an Aqua Brush, these are really cool. So normally have clear water in these. I actually put a little bit of ink in this. I had taken it to a workshop where they wanted to have a little bit of ink in there, but normally it's just clear water. How fun is that, right? Once I added the water, it really just started to transform. Jason Nicholas says, I'm coming from Siifaa. Happy Wednesday. Hey, Dirk, I'm so glad you joined us. That's awesome. Dirk is watching all the way from Germany, right, Dirk? Uh, do you have them anywhere I can check them out? Oh, are you talking Linda? No worries. Really digging the sketch, let's do another. Okay, awesome. Jason Nicholas Nicholas, your video— your photo collage vid was awesome. Means I could pause the screencap to try new amazing shots. Oh cool, was that the One with some New York City buildings, right? I just posted that. Cool. I'm so glad. I'd love to see what you're sketching if you want to share or you're posting your building sketches. I would be more than happy to check them out. That'd be cool. I love the way this is drying. So if you check the edge out here, we have a hard edge right here. And it kind of gets soft a little bit. I love the intensity here. So these Flair pens are really cool for bleeding. I'm actually going to pop in maybe the idea of some windows in here. So I'm randomly just going to— I think I'm going to leave this side kind of white. I like that balance of just kind of whiteness and then some of the color here. So I'm just going to throw down some ink and then we're going to bleed it. Music got mellow. Cool. Let's just kind of bleed this a little bit. I'm just tapping the brush on the paper, letting the water come out. Yeah, there we go. I kind of love this. I actually love the way this is looking up here. So this is my favorite part of the sketch right now. So, Dirk, I'm sure you recognize the copper building from, from Sefat's streams. And he's always— he knows I love the copper building, so he's always kind of pointing it out to me, which I love so much because he knows I'm a huge fan of it. Cool. Hope you guys like that sketch. I think it's kind of fun. I don't know what else I would add to it. Maybe when it dries, I'm going to add some hatch lines in here. Boom, boom. Dirk says, "Absolutely." Yes, I am in— I don't know if I'm going to say this right— Dortmund, Germany. Dortmund? Dortmund? How do you say that in German? Dortmund? I don't know how to say it in German. That's so cool, Dirk. You are my first German viewer. That is fun. I'm going to just outline this a little bit here with the flare just to pull the shape out. Part of me actually— you know what? All right, guys, I need your help here. I need a vote. So for anybody watching, if you can let me know and vote right now, here's what I'm thinking. I would love to break out some of my favorite, favorite Preppy Ink color is the Preppy Yellow, and I would love to throw some of that Preppy Yellow on here. I just think these two colors together would be pretty cool. Let me know, should I throw down some Preppy Yellow on this? We'll see what you guys say. Pretty hip color. It is hip. That's so funny, I love that expression. It's a hip color. Reminds me of that Huey Lewis song, Huey Lewis and the News song, Hip to Be Square. Go for it, Linda says. Go for it. You know what, Linda, I, I'm gonna go for it. Even if nobody voted for it, I was gonna do it anyway, just because, just because. Um, so you may have noticed, I just literally pulled the back of this preppy pen off. I love Preppy pens, but these are really cheaply made and the barrel cracks so easily. You can see the crack right here, I think, right there. So you just gotta be careful with Preppy pens, they do crack easily. But I really love to use the Preppy ink right out of the tube, it's more intense. So I'm literally going to take some out of the tube here. I'm going to do— I'm even a little splatter on, but we're going to change the tunes up. I'm going to put this little jazz playlist. Let's click it. This is fun. It's fun music. So I'm going to do a little bit of splatter on this. Last time I did this was on the SteelStacks sketches. If you guys have seen that, I'm literally just splattering splattering on here and then we'll move some of that around. Let's grab my brush. Here's my brush. Let me open up some water here. I know, the guy's crazy. He just threw ink, splattered ink all over his drawing. So I have some dirty water. I love to use dirty water. I'm actually gonna move that over here. There we go. I don't have a paper towel, do I?
Yes, I do.
Right, I got right here. All right, cool. All right, let's move some of that ink. Normally I have this at an angle. Let me put this at an angle. Let me make our own little prop here. There we go. Okay, cool. And I don't mind having some splatter here. Actually, I'm gonna— I might amp it up a little bit and splatter even more. There we go. So I love splattering. It has energy to it, kind of like New York City has the energy to it, right? We're gonna let that dry like that. I'm gonna let that dry like that. You can see the purple and Preppy Yellow are kind of making dark brownish colors. So I guess yellow and purple would probably make black if they were pure. Oh yeah, I like this. It's fun. I actually like this. Don't want to overdo it, that's the problem. So actually, we'll put the preppy thing back in here and I'll just take some out of the pen, out of the nib here. We'll do this way if I can get it out.
Cool.
Yeah, so the— I can't tighten the— all right, I'm just dragging across some of this yellow just to create a grid here, maybe a window type grid happening. I'll kind of pull it down here as well. Again, I don't want to overdo this, but I actually, I'm really loving it. I'm going to zoom in so you can see some detail. Let me— guys, let me, let me know if you guys like the yellow. Nan's Life, yeah, says yes, preppy yellow. Awesome. Time for some, uh, tastes so good. I like cold coffee. All right, cool. Do you guys like this, or did I go off the deep end? Let me know what you think. And I do want to pull the outline of the building out, and I'm actually going to do that. Let's see if I can use the Flair. I don't know if it's dry enough to use it. It's not dry enough, so I'm actually going to pull out— I have a The Varsity purple pen. This is Pilot Varsity. It's purple, see the cap? So I'm going to use this and we're just going to outline it. Just do a little test on here. There you go. You can see the purple. It's not as pretty as the Flair purple, but that's okay. I want it to be dark so I can just kind of I see how the silhouette of the building is popping out a little bit just by going on the outside of the edge here. And they kind of come down here and pull the top of that skybridge there. Pull this edge out here. This edge here. And I do want to add some hatching under here. There you go. And I think this one might be done. I don't know if I want to add more. The man says as he adds more. I don't know if I want to add more to it. Yeah, I'm digging this, right? So it is not the same color as the photograph you see of the copper building, doesn't have the same windows. My perspective is wonky. This line is way off here, but it's okay. I got so excited when I threw that yellow down. That was the moment of this that I really loved, was just that splatter of color. I think it amped it up to a whole new level. All right, I will be honest, this line is driving me a little crazy. It should have been more straight, but it's loose, it's wonky, we're leaving it. Uh, need some representation of windows on the tilted building. Yeah, so good point. So over in here, right, I was purposely leaving it blank because I figured there was a lot happening on this side. So I wanted to balance it and leave this kind of blank, if that makes sense. So we kind of have this kind of white area here and we have a lot of color. But I see what you're saying, that it could use some representation. So let's, let's, let's do some rap. Let's try some rap.
Uh, let's do it.
And then we can bleed this if I want to soften it. I don't want to think too much.
I just want to—
This is fun music, isn't it? I'm going to bleed this. Because I wanted to soften— I want to soften these window kind of areas here a little bit. I don't know, I actually kind of think I like it blank. So I'm not— I'm going to leave it and pull it back a little bit. Yeah, I'm going to go with my gut. I'm not going to show any windows here, but I totally understand why you would say that. It's full of character, almost like it's bursting at the edges, right?
It's like—
I love that you said that. Great. Great words. You guys are awesome. I always appreciate your feedback and your thoughts and your comments and your input. Thank you so much. Let's zoom out. Let's put this next to the Empire State Building we sketched earlier. So this was a fun show tonight. We got 3. I mean, we did 3 New York City sketches. Oh, I did this on the back. I forgot. Let's put these next to each other. Pretty cool. The classic Empire State Building. I love this one. Black and white. I'm not going to add any color to it. I think it says what it needs to say in just simple black and white. So that's cool. And I think this really needed that splash of color to take it to another energetic level. Loving, loving, loving these. And on the back, we had that quick Chelsea Skybridge sketch here. Notice how I didn't finish. I kind of let it bleed off. So I did that intentionally. I didn't want to create a hard edge and define it. I wanted to kind of just ghost, ghost off the edge of the paper so that way you guys looking at this, whoever is viewing this, can use their imagination. What happens here? It's kind of a big question mark, right? And also this big blank space kind of balances out what's happening here. There's a lot happening. So, we got that kind of balance of a lot to nothing, which is kind of what I was trying to do here. A lot and I need that nothingness to kind of balance the a lotness. Yeah, I don't teach language arts for a reason. I don't even know if that's a word, a lotness, but it was fun to say. Hey, Dirk, great seeing you. Have a great, great night. I appreciate you tuning in. Say good night to Dirk, guys. I appreciate you. Thumbs up. Have a great, great night. I appreciate it. Fascinating. Is your paper textured on both sides? Yeah, great question. So it is. I'll hold it up close. So it's the same texture both sides. You can see it there, right? You can see it there. So great question. So again, so I'm using the, um, 1264 Fabriano watercolor paper. I love this size, guys. This is 4 inches by 8 inches, a really great landscape format vertically or horizontally. Let me close this image here, right? So it's just really just a nice format paper, easy to carry. You can see I did it also here. I love doing it for these interior, um, cathedral spaces or chapel spaces. If you ever go inside a cathedral like St. Patrick's Cathedral, it just soars. You go in there and it soars vertically. So this landscape format really lends itself to things that soar and have verticality to them, just like the Empire State Building, right? It kind of soars and has a verticality to it. You know, if I was to do the sketch on this square paper, 8x8, yeah, I could have done it, but it doesn't— I feel like the narrowness of this paper compresses it and forces your eye to kind of go up, up and down the paper. If I was to do the same thing on the square, I wouldn't have that pressure or force to keep it so vertical. So that's, that's kind of a trick I like to use, why I use different papers. I want something to be very vertical or even horizontal, like a landscape. I like this format paper. Cool stuff, guys. Let me know if you have any final questions before I wrap up on this beautiful Wednesday fall day here in the Garden State. I'm liking this jazz music. What do you guys think? Uh, I'm looking around. Do I want— maybe we're going to end. We're going to end with a real quick sketch. I'm going to put a 2-minute timer on. Let's just do a 2-minute sketch. And it's just going to be freeform, nothing New York City related. We'll see what happens in our 2 minutes. Thank you guys for watching. I do appreciate you. Thank you for liking these videos. Thank you for subscribing on YouTube and Facebook and following me and all that social stuff. It does mean a lot because I just feel like the more people I reach, I just want to put positive, positive vibes out there. The more people I can do that with, that would be awesome. All right, I'm gonna put the 2-minute timer on. Let's do it. I'm gonna switch— where's my timer thingy? Here it is. That's set at 10. Let me set this at 2. I gotta just change it. That is not— I just put 22 hours. You can't see what I'm doing. I'm setting the timer and I just set it for 22 hours. That's not gonna happen. All right, we're gonna do a 3-minute. Sketch. All right, all right, 3 minutes. Let's just sketch something. You know what, I'm switching paper. I know, wasting my time. You got time. Sometimes, sometimes I'll sketch a frame, and especially if I'm doing like a one-point perspective, I'll usually start with a frame. Let's just do a quick, maybe a little cityscape. So you guys that have been following me, I used to do used the Whistling Cowboy sketches at the end of these shows, and they would sketch a character called the Whistling Cowboy and his dog Retro. Let's start bringing that back. All right, so we did a sky bridge, so maybe there's a sky bridge in the distance here. I'm not looking at the time. I just did. Got a sky bridge maybe connecting Seeing these buildings, some kind of sidewalk thingy happening here. That was fun, fun music. Some kind of a building edge there, and we're going to get cray cray. We're going to actually throw some of this flare down and we're gonna bleed this ink and see what happens. I don't want to dip that in my coffee. Still have yellow ink on there, that's cool, no worries. This is just a fun kind of loose freeform sketch here. A little bridge in the background. I'm gonna add— I'm gonna really bleed this more, so I'm gonna Throw down some flair. I might go past the time, that's okay. Yeah, I'll go past it. I feel like I need something. I want to pull this building out. It's in the foreground. I'm going to big— grab my thick Sharpie here. I just want to pull this out so this building actually kind of continues down a little bit. Let's outline this as well. Sharpies do not like to write on wet areas.
And then let's do, uh, take my Pilot—
I'm not gonna sell my Pilot— my Precise Pen and We're just going to do some vertical just to indicate—
well, you'll see, you'll see what I'm doing.
So I'm just doing these vertical lines just to indicate some kind of a sky. Sky or something happening here. I could have colored it blue, I could have done a watercolor or ink wash there, but I want to keep kind of an energy— energetic feel. Maybe it's raining, maybe these are raindrops coming down in the city. So maybe we have some rain falling. Boom. And then we have the Whistling Cowboy is actually gonna be here in the background. I'm out of practice, I haven't sketched him in so long. Whistling Cowboy's kinda happening right back there. Retro will be— Retro mysteriously got on top of the sky bridge here. I'm out of practice with Retro. There we go. Whistling Cowboy. Retro. Cool, there we go. Just a quick little perspective, guys. Just a fun drawing. All right guys, I think I'm gonna wrap up. Hope you're doing well. DB's in the house! DB, long time no see. Hope you're doing well. Always great to see you. Awesome, hope you are doing well. Nance Life, I may need to look some of that paper up. Yeah. If you're still on, here it is. Check it out. I used to use— if you're still on, I'm not sure, but I used to use this. Where is it?
Here.
So this is— this was always my go-to paper. I still love the Canson as a go-to, but I actually do like the Fabriano better. For sketching on. The texture is a little different, but this was my definite other go-to here. Pretty cool.
Awesome.
You guys are amazing. Thank you so much for watching. DB, I'm so glad you popped in. We'll definitely have to catch up some. I hope you're doing amazing, guys. I'm gonna head out. Appreciate you all so, so much.
Much.
Keep paying it forward out there, you know. I like to say, but you can use your creativity for positivity. And, um, yeah, thank you guys so, so much. Here's our— what we did tonight. Thank you so much. Take care. It's hard for me to say goodbye, but I need to head off. Take care, guys. Peace and live creatively. I will see you real soon. And yeah, have a great, great rest of your week. See ya! Ooh, I just hit the camera. Bye. Oops.










