The (Ink)spired Life - Architectural Sketching
In this live YouTube stream, artist and educator Jason Nicholas guides viewers through an impromptu sketch of a futuristic, dystopian city streetscape. He works on mixed‑media paper, using a Pilot Precise pen, Prismacolor colored pencils, neon pink and chartreuse, a water‑soluble graphite stick, ArtGraph water‑soluble chalk, and Winsor Newton watercolor markers. Throughout the session he narrates his process—choosing perspective, adding chaotic line work, experimenting with light washes, and testing how different media behave on the paper. Jason frequently interacts with the chat, acknowledging viewers like Linda, Eris, Patty, D‑Ray, and others, thanking them for their support and encouraging them to share ideas for future sketch assignments, such as iconic buildings. He explains the inspiration behind the piece (a student’s video‑game “Stray” and Blade‑Runner‑style aesthetics), reflects on the learning journey versus final product, and demonstrates techniques like using a graphite stick with water, creating brick‑like textures with ArtGraph, and applying watercolor markers by lifting color from a palette. The stream concludes with Jason summarizing the experiment, inviting further community participation, and outlining his upcoming schedule.
Chapters
Hey everybody, happy, uh, Sunday, October 15th. Hope you're all doing well. I'm on just for a few minutes. I'm going to do a sketch tonight and yeah, let's just, let's just let it get going. Easy for me to say. Hope you guys are doing really great. Had a great weekend. So tonight I'm sketching on— it's just kind of regular paper, I guess. I'm not even sure what to call it. It's a sketchbook. It's not watercolor paper. I guess like a mixed— it's probably a mixed media type of paper. I just wanted to try something different and I thought maybe we'd do some kind of little city perspective type scene here. Kick, uh, quick and loose, all that fun stuff. Let me know how you're doing. Hope you had an awesome day today. I got school tomorrow.
Yippee!
I don't really mind it. I love teaching, so it's all good. Although I could always use an extra weekend day. I'm sure we all could. I can't believe we're halfway through this month. It's going so fast. I love the fall. It just gets dark a little too early. It's the only thing I would probably change. Other than that, the fall is awesome. The colors are amazing. Just a beautiful time of the year. So, I'm sketching a city scene here, almost like a futuristic dystopian kind of society type of scene. And I was inspired by one of my students who plays a video game that has It takes place in a kind of a dystopian society. I forget the name of the game, but I know there's a cat in the game. So I told her I would try to sketch something kind of dystopian to kind of match the feeling of the game. Pretty cool. Anyway, hope you guys are doing well. If you have any questions or comments, let me know. I always appreciate everybody watching on YouTube and Facebook and sharing and liking and giving thumbs up. That's awesome. Whenever you give a thumbs up on YouTube, it helps to spread the word and get more people watching, which would be awesome. For sure. Hey Linda, great to see you. Hope all's well. Thanks for tuning in. Hope you're having an amazing Sunday.
Yes.
Let me zoom in on this. So it's kind of a really kind of crazy, chaotic perspective scene here, looking down perhaps a street or an alleyway here. And I want to have a very busy kind of vibe to it. So there's a lot of lines going on here on this one. And I'll eventually be adding some color to pop out some of the details and probably be using colored pencils because this is just— it's mixed media paper. I don't know how well it's going to take a watercolor wash. But we'll see, I might play around and just, we'll maybe experiment and see how that works. But yeah, I hope you guys are doing well as always.
Cool.
And I am using my Pilot Precise here. Awesome. I kind of like where that's headed. And I have a colored pencil. I was looking for my neon yellow. I don't know where my neon yellow colored pencil is. I'm looking around the room, but I'm only around for another couple minutes. And let me just add some neon pink on here, just play around, pop in some color. Maybe we'll do something, uh, kind of in here. Hey, Eris, I hope all is well. Good to see you. This street sketch is so erratic, I like it. So that's cool, I'm glad you said that. So I'm going for erratic. Um, it's based on So, I have a student that she was showing me some images from this video game. I can't remember what it's called, but it takes place in a, like a dystopian kind of society. Really crazy, busy, chaotic streets almost. If anybody knows Blade Runner or has seen the Blade Runner movies, it almost has that kind of vibe to the aesthetics. So, I thought it'd be fun just to come on and kind of mimic or just trying to get the idea of this erratic kind of streetscape. So I'm glad you said that because that was kind of the goal with this. So thank you. I am missing my neon. I might have to— I might use a highlighter. Let me take another look. It's in here. Nope. Hmm, where could it be? I mean, one more place I could look. Let me take a look. Negative, negative. I, I don't know where the heck My neon. Well, let's pull out some chartreuse. There we go. I must want to pop some of these. There's a lot of like signs and things going on here, so let's pop some of those colors out. This, this. Um, let's grab some light aqua as well. See which one's sharp. That one's sharper. We'll use that one for now. Cool. Anyway, I hope you guys are having an amazing day. As always, I've probably said it a thousand times because I am like a broken record. But I mean it. I care. I want everybody to have— make sure everybody's doing well out there. It's fun. Sometimes it's fun to step outside your comfort zone. I like doing city drawings. I love doing perspectives, streetscapes. But something with a different vibe, it's fun to give it a try, right? That's what I love about just creating, is just trying different things, having fun, playing around a little bit. Let's see what we got here. Some orange, just kind of grabbing and going with some Color pencils. Love the pink. Awesome. Yes, Arrow said Stray. That is— that's the game. Thank you so much. I can't remember the name of it. It's called Stray. Um, love the pink. Yeah, I think, right? This is neon pink. Boom. My fave go-to color. These, these are my two of my favorite colored pencil colors. The neon pink, the light aqua. Really fun colors to play around with. Let's see, I'm gonna break out— I'm gonna break out my graphite stick here, darken up some of these areas, but I'm going to do it with the graphite graphite stick. And I might try, I might try, um, doing a little wash on this even though it's mixed media paper. We'll play around, see how it goes. Just want to create some dark areas. It's kind of a nighttime scene. Let's just grab a little bit of I actually have an aqua brush. Let's use this aqua brush here. I just want to kind of tap it on here. I don't want to wet it too much. See, I want to see if it's bleeding through at all. Oh, actually no. All right, so I can do a very, very light wash on this paper. That's cool, good to know. But I really should have done a gray wash over all this whole thing and really kind of darken it up. I'll be sketching more scenes like this. This is kind of my first crack at it. Now I think about it, it would be great to have just a nice gray wash and then add color on top of that just to get that dark aesthetic in the background.
So I'm just gonna—
just kind of do that a little bit with graphite.
Cool.
So great to see you guys. You're Awesome. Linda's been doing some watercolor circles— watercolor circle colors mixing this weekend. That sounds fun, love it. Eris says she's done a lot of art the past few days. That's awesome. I love when you guys are out there creating. That's what it's about, having fun, getting in the zone. Some people like to sketch, paint, and draw for, uh, for meditative purposes, get the creative juices going. Sometimes it's just a good change of mindset from other things you're doing. So when it's time to revisit this, I'm going to really kind of study, make it a study about light and shadow. I think that's really going to be important to get the kind of mood or atmosphere. This is Process Red. I'm looking for my— for Process Red. Yeah, I love this color, colored pencil. It's called Process Red. By the way, I love using Prismacolor Premier colored pencils. They're not watercolor pencils, just regular colored pencils. I do like this Process Red color. Let's throw some on here. And let's break out some highlighter. I can't find my neon color pencil, so let's throw some highlighter on here. Awesome! Um, let's see. Got to keep the Barbie pink live and well. Oh yeah, neon pink, absolutely. Jason Nicholas Nicholas, if you ever get the chance, I love that you're trying different streetscapes because there's so much variety. I love seeing your interpretation of streets like this, not just a building. Hey, that's cool. Thank you so much, uh, Eriseth. That's awesome. Yeah, it's always fun to step outside a little bit, right? Um, it's not really going the direction I wanted to, but it's the first time I've ever tried something kind of crazy and chaotic. But I'm learning, right? Part of the fun for me is the learning process. It's not for me always about Z. It's actually really hardly ever about Z. Z being the final result. But I love the journey that happens between A and Z. Love that. And sketch border with wires and clock protruding at the top. Love that. Oh, cool. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I love the wires. Wires really add to kind of a chaotic feel for the scene. Looks like a French back alley off a normal path. Ooh, Linda, that's fun. Fun. I could, I could see that. I totally can see that. It's definitely too, um, it's too bright and vibrant. It's not, it's not the mood I was going for. But again, I'm just— it's a learning process, right? I'm just going to add some blue on here. I'm just going to keep adding some colors. Why not? I'd love to draw a French alleyway. That would be so cool. So you saw I broke out the graphite, broke out my finger as a tool, did some, uh, blending. Let's pull an eraser and try a little something something here. You guys, you guys have hardly see me use an eraser on anything. And here, it's not really— I can make it darker. So the idea was to shade things in dark and erase highlights off of it. So definitely is something I want to work on. Let's just do this to kind of— maybe we got a rainy kind of vibe happening here. Here's my, uh, pen. Also, I feel like if I was— if I did some watercolor paper, I could— I would get a wash on it that I think would really kind of lend to the effect I wanted to have.
Cool.
It has the older section of town. Looks— look, uh, look to it colorful. Yeah, a little dirty. Yeah, it's colorful, a little bit dirty. So is the graphite water reactive? Yeah, so this is water-soluble graphite stick. Let's actually play around with this on some— I'm gonna break out some watercolor paper. I think this is fun. This is a cool little, um, playful experiment here. Let me just put a date on it. What today is? What We'll put— we'll sign it here, and we'll put the month and the year.
Cool.
All right, if you guys want to stick around for a few more minutes, let me break out some watercolor paper and we'll try something else. Play around with the graphite stick. All right, what do we got going here? All right, cool. All right, so we have some watercolor paper, Fabriano, a couple of bridge— I was showing some bridge sketches off in school the other day, but that's not what we have here. We've got kind of scrap paper here. Let's just mess around with the scrap piece. I was just, uh, I was doing a demonstration class last week on how to draw a dome. Oh, that reminds me, I still have to assign my sketchbook assignment for the week. I guess I'll do that tomorrow morning. Um, I need a topic. If you guys want to help me, name an iconic building. I'm having my students sketch iconic buildings for the architecture texture assignments. So maybe if you guys want to put some suggestions in there. All right, so let's play with the graphite stick. Uh, we'll just— we're going to do right on this little— again, this is just kind of a throwaway thingy, but here I'm going to throw it on a graphite stick and I'll show you that it's water soluble, which is cool, and we'll see what we can do with this bad boy. I'm gonna actually break out some water. Hold on a sec. There we go. Yeah, so as you can see, this graphite is water soluble. It's really awesome. Couple ways— here's some different ways I like to use it. One is you can just draw right on the paper, add water, paint it around. Another thing I like to do is I like to sometimes actually dip the art Graphite stick right in water and then just do some kind of like sketch painting with it. So you can kind of see the effect of just dipping it in water and sketching with it. I actually really love this technique. And then sometimes I'll actually do this too. I'll put it on my board and then I'll just kind of wet my brush here in some water and I'll just kind of paint with it like right off the palette. So there's many different ways you can use it. I especially like it when I'm doing kind of my grungy industrial type scenes. Really sketchy. I don't know, we're just messing around here, guys. And we got some kind of industrial vibe building-ish thing happening back here. There's also— I also have other colors. I have this right here, Art Graph, tailor-shaped, water-soluble. I guess it's I guess it's like chalk-like material, but this stuff's really awesome. Check this out. Stuff is messy, but it's fun. And the same way I was just using the graphite stick, we can use this as well. Let me show you. So I'm actually going to dip— I'm going to dip this right in the water. This is Sambolin color.
Sanguine, sanguine.
I love this color. Check this out. Let's just do it on this building.
Why not?
Zoom in so you can see it. This stuff is awesome. I also like to do this with it if I want just some edges. Let's just make like Let's pretend it's like a brick building here. I can kind of tap it down like this. I dip the edge in water. You can get these kind of brick-like effects going on here just by tapping it down. So it's pretty, pretty cool stuff. And you can see it's messy. I have it on my fingers, but that's part of the fun. Um, Taj Mahal, that's iconic. Yes, Taj Mahal is iconic, definitely. The Needle in Seattle, that's iconic as well. And the John— John Hancock Building, St. Louis Arch, Old Church in Boston, White House in D.C. OMG, you have so many awesome ideas. You guys are amazing. This was— last week's was their choice. They could sketch anything they wanted to. And the week before was right here, was the Hagia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul.
Istanbul, Turkey.
So you guys have some great ideas. Thank you so much, and I'll definitely consider those. But there you go. So I just want to mess around. You guys can see some of the things you can do with this ArtGraph stuff. I'm just having fun playing around. Let's put this in here. Uh, I want to color this. I think I think it's gonna go well with this, is this breakout. I haven't used these in a while. I love using the Winsor Newton watercolor markers. Right here, Winsor Newton watercolor markers. Cool stuff. I like to use these by actually lifting the color off a palette. So these are fun also if you haven't tried using the watercolor markers. The reason I like, I like to lift the color off of a palette is if I put— I find that if I put the color directly on the paper, it is definitely vibrant, but it doesn't always move around the way I want it to. Alright, let's take this one home. I need some windows on this, don't I? We're going to grab the king of Sharpies. I don't think this one works anymore. Nope. Darn it. I got to throw this out. Let's grab this Sharpie and we'll just get— we're just going to add some— indicate some kind of windows here. Maybe there's some industrial type of buildings. Alright, cool, awesome. So it was a little fun, quick whatnot type of sketch. It was a scrap, so I figured we'd just mess around on there, play around with some things. Yeah, let me check in with the comments, see how you guys are doing. I'm gonna wrap up. So we did that kind of little dystopian European scene streetscape. And we just messed around. I want to show you guys some graphite stick stuff. Yeah. So it's not just kind of a playful, fun session. Bum bum bum. Patty's in the house. Hey, Patty. Hope all's well. Great to see you. Very, very fun. Hope all's well with you. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for watching tonight. Just having fun with me as I mess around, as I continue to add some colors on this. Doesn't hurt to have a little bit of blue on here, does it? All right, awesome. Um, I see your face in your house. Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a face right here, right? Boom. That's funny you saw that. Um, there's an amazing design piece called, called the Cold to Her Sets. Maybe Google that. You're very modern with a cool roof like a skate park. Ooh, I'm gonna check that out. That sounds awesome. Thank you, Jason Nicholas, for watching your fun drawings tonight. Awesome, thank you so much. I appreciate that. Hey, you guys are amazing. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. Just wanted to do some fun creative experimenting, playing around. Yeah, I do appreciate you guys so, so much. You're amazing. Thank you for liking this on Facebook, on YouTube, wherever you're watching. As long as you're getting something positive out of this, My job is done. Um, and it looks like it's wearing a baseball hat backwards. It does. We're having fun with buildings. Let's make them buildings into people, right? Why not? Patty, I love that you're seeing that. Patty has an awesome creative, um, vision. So cool. Now I'm just getting crazy, just throwing any kind of colors down. Awesome. This is an award winner. No, it isn't. But it was just fun to sketch. You guys are great. Oops. Dropping stuff. This one's cool. I still love this sketch. Awesome. And keep black and white. I'm going to keep this one black and white as well. As we continue our bridge— NYC bridges. Fun stuff, right guys? Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday evening. Um, yeah, have a great, great Monday. I said great to see you, always learning something new. Awesome. D-Ray is in the house. D-Ray, great to see you. Hope all's well. Awesome. Patty, it was always great seeing you. And Linda, you guys, I appreciate your comments and your feedback and your, your positivity out there. Keep it going. Always great, great stuff. I'm out of here, guys. Keep paying it forward, use your creativity for positivity. And, um, I have a busy, busy, busy week coming up. I don't know if I'll be popping on. Let's see, I'm just thinking in my brain. Monday, maybe Monday night. Tuesday, probably not. Wednesday, probably not. Maybe Thursday night. We'll see. Take care, guys. Peace, live creatively, see you real soon. I gotta wave with this hand so I can hit the finish button with the other one.
Take care.
Wait, where's that finish button? It's coming up somewhere. I can't find the finish button. There it is. See you guys, take care.
