An artist sketches New York's Copper Building, an H-shaped structure with a sky bridge, first on watercolor paper with Sharpie and Lamy pen, then tests a new Big Idea sketchbook. The thin paper buckles slightly with water and Sharpie ink bleeds through, but he experiments with ink washes anyway, comparing how each tool feels.
Hello, hope you're having an awesome Tuesday night. Yeah, it's Tuesday, April 2nd. Hope all is well. Just coming on for a real few minutes, a few brief minutes. I'm just gonna do some, do some sketching before I head off to sleepy land. So I'm just doing a quick sketch of the, um, this is the Copper Building, NYC. My, one of my favorites. Love this building. It'll be fun to do a quick sketch, and I'm also gonna try a new sketchbook tonight that I haven't used yet. I'm curious to see, uh, what it's like. So this is the Copper Building. It kind of looks like the letter H. I love the sky bridge that comes across right here. Really, really cool architectural feature. Um, it has this really awesome kind of bend up here at the top, which is really, really fun. Cool, there we go. So it's just a quick, quick outline of the copper building. So I started off with a Sharpie, and then I went to, um, I wanted to darken a little bit. My Sharpie's kind of drying out, so I broke out the Lamy pen. It has a nice dark, nice black ink to it. It'll be fun to outline it I could bleed this ink, add some water to it. I'm just going to leave it like this for now. And I'm just on really quickly, just wanted to pop on. Um, so that was done on— this is 140-pound watercolor, cold press watercolor paper. You see the texture on there? Pretty cool. And then let's take a look at this sketchbook I'm going to crack open right here. Haven't used it. This was actually gifted to me, um, and I'm really super excited to give it a try and see what it's about. So it's called Big— The Big Idea Book. Love the name. Big Idea Sketchbook. Here's— zoom in on it. Let's open it up and just, uh, do a quick sketch and see what it's like. There we go. I don't have fingernails to open this up. There we go, got it. Actually, I love the color of the COVID It is black and white, really cool looking. So it's a real slick paper inside. It's fairly thin. We'll see if it bleeds through. I'm gonna— I'll do another sketch of the copper building and I'll use a Sharpie and a Lamy. We'll just see how the sketchbook paper holds up. I do like the weight of this. It has a nice heft to it. Just feels good. Let's give it a shot. Zumino on it. There we go. All right, let's do the copper building again here. Keep working with the Sharpie, it's kind of drying out on me. I sometimes— I like to sketch with a Sharpie or a marker, just kind of drawing out, get interesting lines with it, different variations. Helps add to that kind of loose sketchy look that I love so much. See, we have a sky bridge here that kind of comes across. It'll connect to the other side of the building. I just think this is a very fun and whimsical skyscraper. I would love to go inside here, especially up in the Skybridge area. I think that'd be so, so cool. Maybe one day we'll get inside. Yeah, so this paper is interesting. It's very different than the rough watercolor paper. It's definitely very slick. Um, it does— it is bleeding through a little bit. You can see the Sharpie coming through. It's always fun just to try different papers out, right? I might actually even try to bleed some ink on here. Let's see what it does. So I'm just going to shade in the side here, shade down here as well. Shade under the sky bridge, just give a little depth to it. Boom. Uh, let's see, I'm gonna break out the Lamy, and I'm gonna go around the outside edges to darken it up. There we go. So I'm just going on around the outside edge here just to kind of darken this up a little bit. Cool. That's the basic shape of the copper building. Again, we have the H. You can see there's the other one I did here. So just for fun, let's bleed some ink and we'll just see how this paper is at doing a kind of a wash. So I'm gonna— I'm actually just gonna grab my Aqua brush here. We'll just use this to kind of bleed some of that Lamy black ink I just threw down. You can see it bleeding there. Cool. So, so I'm flipping it over to check this side. Um, it's buckling a little bit, the paper. So it looks like it can hold just a little bit of water, very, very light wash on there. Uh, let's see, I'm going to grab— I'm just grabbing and going here. I happen to have a bunch of red Pilot Precises here. Let's just bleed some of this red ink, uh, for fun and just see See what happens with the paper. Just gonna shade in some of these window areas, and we're gonna take the Aqua brush and we'll just kind of bleed some of this red ink. I love trying new paper, new pens. It's always so fun to see what they do. See some of that red ink. It's actually doing pretty well on the other side. You can see, kind of see it a little bit coming through. It's not saturated. So there you go, just a quick, quick sketch of the Copper Building. And, uh, yeah, I kind of— uh, this paper is interesting for sure. I'll be playing around with it a lot more. It's the Big Idea book, so I'll be putting a lot of big ideas in here. Um, shout out to, um, Ray and Team Ray for sending this cool sketchbook over to me. I really, really appreciate it and looking forward to seeing what adventures happen within the pages here. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an awesome, awesome rest of your night. Take care, see you soon. Use your creativity for positive. Have a great night.
