The INKspired Life

Hey everybody, happy, um, Friday, September 15th. It's 8:29 PM here in awesome New Jersey. Hope you're having a great, great night. Popping on just for a few minutes here, um, I feel like doing the sketch. I haven't really sketched anything today, and I'm gonna sketch, uh, I have a picture on screen of the copper buildings. Let me know if you can hear me. I have a different microphone setup. I don't know if the volume is right, if the connections are right. I'm not sure, I didn't test anything. But if you're watching in the comments, just give me a thumbs up or say yeah, you can me. I hope you can hear me, um, unless you don't want to. All right, let's do, uh, let's sketch the copper buildings here. If you're watching, let me know where you're watching from so I can give you a shout out. So I just want to capture some of the copper building. The copper building in this photograph is the— it's the the building. It looks like two buildings connected, and they're connected by a sky bridge, um, on the top left-hand side of the picture. And they're kind of bent at angles. I'm— I love this building. I'm fascinated with the Copper Building. This is a photograph I actually took of it. I have never been inside. I would love to get inside this building. I just think it's a really fun architecture Lots of skyscrapers we see are straight, right? They're totally straight up and down. This is fun, it has angles on it, which makes it really playful. Hey, I see Linda's in the house! Linda, good to see you, hope all is well. So I'm sketching here, here's kind of where the sky bridge is, and as I'm sketching, I'm just pulling out shapes I see in the photograph, and I want to be quick, loose. You guys have been watching me, I know I'm kind of like a broken record, but that's just my style. I don't like to— I'm not here to sketch exactly what we're seeing by any means. I like the loose, wonky lines. It's, it's just It makes it more fun for me instead of recreating the photograph. So hopefully you can kind of see it starting to shape here. Here's that building on the right that bends. Here's the one on the left. There's kind of that Skybridge piece connecting the two happening there. This comes in and it kind of kicks out a little bit, so I'm not going to fit the entire building, and that's okay. Um, I just want to fit a part of it and kind of just focus on the piece you see. I do have bigger paper if I wanted to fit more, I could do that. Linda says thank you, all good with me, hope you had a wonderful week at school. Yeah, this was a really great week. It was actually our first full week of school and I, I am, uh I'm just really fortunate. I have such amazing kids in class. I am really lucky. I have to give a shout out to them because they got me over the 500 subscriber mark today on— right here on YouTube. So many of you guys are out there, thank you so much for subscribing. You— everybody is a team. You guys got me over the 500 mark, which is awesome. It's been a goal of mine to hit 500 subscribers and it happened today. I'm like, I am so, so excited. Um, this weekend I'll, I'll do a little live presentation and maybe I'll give away a sketch to celebrate. But yeah, I'm so happy. And shout out to, to, um, this, to my students today who did it for me, and I did not solicit it, so they did it on their own and I which means a lot. So thank you guys if you're out there live or watching a replay, you guys are awesome. So here I just captured the shape, the feel. Sorry if I'm sketching crooked. I like to turn my paper when I'm sketching. So I could do this for you guys, it looks straight. But in reality, this is exactly how the sheet of paper is on my board. It is literally crooked like that. Window— we got some windows happening here, and I'm not going to draw all the windows.

I just—

on these quick drawings, I just kind of like to show some rectangles or even just lines here, punching some lines in to indicate we have window openings. These are going to make a little darker. I think this is an open-air area on the building. Linda says, that's great. Thank you, Linda, I appreciate that. And Linda, thank you, you're always so positive here on YouTube, uh, it means a lot. So thank you for all your support and positive comments, I really appreciate it. That's what this is about, it's just sketching for fun, positive vibes. Hopefully I'm sharing some, some wisdom that I know about sketching. I'm not the wisest man for sure, but I just want to share maybe some of the pointers and things I do to get the style I like. And more importantly, I just hope, I hope I can— I'm encouraging you guys to pick up a pen or pencil, crayons, markers, or any— just to do anything creative with a mindset of having fun and just learning from the process. Not being afraid of making mistakes. That is what— that's what really set me back, um, was just afraid of making mistakes and not capturing what I'm seeing like a camera photograph would. So I've had to train myself over the years just to be in my brain to say, it's okay, just have fun with it. This is kind of therapeutic for me, guys. It's just, like I said, it's just fun. And I know I repeat myself a lot, so I apologize, but I do that when I'm excited. Cool. So you can see I'm just poking in some windows, right? Really cool. And I'm not showing everyone And I think I'm going to throw a little bit of color on this just for fun, guys. We'll do an ink wash. So in, in class today, we were talking about sketching and adding ink washes. Um, I have my students do weekly sketchbook assignments. Some love it, some hate it, but there's a purpose to it. I really believe that when we sketch things, it does something. Embeds a place, a time, a memory, a building into our brains a little bit better. And it's also just a great way of communicating ideas quickly. So I got this— this is done in Sharpie, so that way when I add ink on top of it, it's not going to bleed. So do I want to do ink or watercolor? Hmm, you know what, I'm actually— I'm actually going to break out some watercolor. I have watercolor right here. So let me just move this over a little bit. Let's throw some watercolor on here just for fun. And I'm actually going to turn the picture off because we don't really need to see it. Cool. Let's just have fun. So when I add colors, you know, color washes to, uh, these types of sketches I am not trying to recreate the color that I see. Like, 90% of the time, I'm really— I'm not trying to recreate it. So I just want to have fun. I'm feeling like I want to light some aqua on this, or turquoise, some orange. We'll kind of maybe make our own rusty type of color. So let me just add some water. I haven't used my watercolors in a while, so they take a minute or two so they get nice and, uh Wet here and ready to go. So that orange, some aqua. You guys can see I like messy palettes. I mix everything in here. Once in a while I will clean it out and start fresh, but I just like kind of the grungy look when I'm, when I'm sketching and painting. So I keep everything a little bit mixed up and messy.

Cool.

Hey, uh, Prussian Man. Hey, it's me. Hey, hey, thanks for watching. Hope you're doing well. That's so cool, I appreciate that. Very cool. Linda's in the house. Linda, good to see you too. Cameron says good evening. Hey Cameron, good evening Cameron. Hope you're doing well. Hope your semester is off to a great start. I'll have to catch up with you and we'll talk, see what kind kind of projects you're working on in college. So I'm throwing some water down on top of my ink. Notice it's not bleeding. So Sharpie pens will not bleed and run when I add water. So that's why I like to start with a Sharpie. Other black pens might bleed and you'll get kind of a black mess and a muddy mess on here, right? All right, so let's throw down, uh, some turquoise. We'll some orange down. Ideas, just to have fun, guys. I'm not so worried. I'm not worried that this is not the color of the actual copper building, which, which actually is made of copper. I think the copper building was— I think it was opened in 2017. It's located in New York City on the East River. Designed by SHoP Architects. That's S-H-O-P. They do really cool work. And the thing that really struck me about this building were two things. It's the iconic angles of it and the sky bridge right here. I'm throwing some orange on top of that aqua and I'm getting kind of a rusty color on it, which is fun. And notice I'm leaving a lot of white space. I'm not trying to color everything in. I'm going outside the lines. That's, that's intentional.

Let's throw—

I'm going to just load up some orange on the brush here and just kind of drop it in in some places. There we go. So this is actually watercolor paper I'm sketching and painting on, and it's nice and thick so it's not going to bleed through. Yeah, it's looking cool. I'm liking it. I'm gonna load up some of this turquoise color, and let's— I like the contrast of kind of the turquoise and the orange, orangey colors happening. So I'm going to lay, lay down some thick turquoise right there, and I'm actually going to throw some more in. What else do I want to pop? We'll just kind of pop the top out here a little bit. So I'm almost drawing right now with the watercolor. Not painting. So I'm kind of drawing these lines here. I feel like we need a little pop of, uh, freshness, a little brightness to this, and I love adding yellow for that. And here's a, like, a lemon yellow color. So let's throw some of that lemony yellow. We will throw a pop of that on top here. I, I like when colors mix together, so you'll see here the yellow ran into the orange and the blue. That's per— perfectly fine. I don't know what I'm gonna do with the bridge. I think I'm gonna leave the sky bridge— I don't know if I'm gonna pop it out with yellow. I might, or I might just leave it as white space. But if I leave the bridge here white and the background white, it's not gonna pop like I really want it to. So let's just throw some yellow. I'm gonna throw some yellow on this bridge area just so it pops a little bit. So you can see by throwing the yellow down, it really brings some attention to that. So we have yellow, yellow. I kind of like to balance colors, and so I have yellow here, yellow here. So I might have a touch of yellow somewhere else to kind of bring your eye like diagonally down. So let's see, where should we put that? My brain's saying down here somewhere. So let's just throw a little bit of yellow down here. There you go. Awesome. Hey, Nan's Life 7, thank you. Congrats on getting halfway to the million. I wish it was million thousand though, but I have 500. I'll take 500 subscribers. Thanks for that. Appreciate you joining and watching. Nan's Life, Nan's Life 7, that's a cool name. It looks like you have a cool, um, maybe sketch or drawing on your avatar. Awesome, I appreciate the kind words. I love how watercolor dries and ink washes dry. Zoom in so you can see it. So it's starting to dry, and I'm gonna zoom in even closer actually. Check this out, this is really fun the way this is drying. The colors have mixed. I love hard edges. Hard edges. Here's an example right here, just the way it's drying. I really love hard edges in these, in these sketches. This looks cool to me. The way all these colors are coming together. And I like that you can see the texture of the paper showing through. And for me, that just adds another element of, you know, another kind of a layer or interest to the sketch without me having to paint something there or draw something. It's just the paper doing it, so that's kind of fun. I think I'm only going to work with these 3 colors and I'll probably end up breaking out at some point towards the end. I'll probably throw in— I love this. This is— let me zoom out a little bit. This is my favorite color colored pencil, one of my favorites. I have 2. Light Aqua. It's just a regular colored pencil. Not watercolor. And then for you guys who have been watching me for a while, you know I like to throw a pop of this neon pink somewhere. And that's just for me, adds a flavor of fun or a bit of, uh, like wonkiness or not. Yeah, whimsy to the— yes, to the sketch. Cool. Uh, thanks. I love working with graphite. Oh, awesome. But I've recently been playing with ink and watercolor. That's cool. So I have a graphite stick here. Boom. I— so when I use, um, these graphite sticks, they're water soluble. You might probably know this, and they're really fun because I can dissolve it with water, paint with it. So I love using these graphite sticks. Fun stuff. That's really cool. So as this is drying, I kind of want to hit a little bit more and intensify some of the orange. So I'm just going to load up some orange on my brush and I just want to kind of go over it and just— you can see how that's kind of popping a little bit more, right? That's cool. So again, if you're just joining us, thank you guys for watching, and, uh, thank you for helping me to get over the 500 subscriber mark on YouTube. That's really fun. And for me, you know, honestly, it's Why, why I want more people to watch is I just want to spread more positivity through creativity. That's kind of my goal, through sketching and having fun. So that's why, that's why it's really cool for me just to see, see the numbers growing a little bit. It's really awesome. Now let's intensify some of that turquoise. I'm going to dig in Just kind of grabbing on my brush here. You can kind of see— where's that camera? There it is. I don't know if you can see it on the end of the brush. Yeah, I'm really liking the way this is looking. I'm going to leave this yellow. I think that's— I like the way this yellow for me is kind of balancing these colors up here. I, I don't know if I'm gonna add much more color to this. I'm kind of liking where it is right now. One thing I do want to do is kind of just outline, I think, the edge of the buildings a little bit more so it pops. So we'll do that. Um, I could use my Lamy. I have a Lamy fountain pen with black Lamy ink in it, but this, this ink will bleed, and I don't think I want it to bleed for the edge, so I'm not going to use that. I might, I might just stick with my Sharpie for now. We'll see how it looks. Uh, what type of paper are you using? Good question. So here I'm using— I'm using 1264 Fabriano watercolor paper, 140-pound. I love this size, it's 4 inches by 8 inches, so it's a really cool format. So hopefully that helps, and I'll hold it closer to the camera if you can see some of the texture. And that's the texture of it. There's a little bit of roughness, which I, which I really like. So yes, Fabriano. I'm gonna move this here. Let me see if I can just darken up some of these edges a little bit. Sharpies do not like to write on wet areas, so it's probably not going to work that well right now because it's still kind of wet. So I might actually have to wait to darken that in. But, um, let's see, let's— we can throw in some pink. We don't want to throw some pink in. Maybe I'll pop some in here. So let's put a little bit right in there, kind of follow that shape. And I'll usually touch it in 3 places. So that's one. I kind of like the white space there. I don't want to mess that up. Let's just do a little, little splash of pink up in this top part of the building. It's a real small touch there. And let's have one— I think I want one low.

Let's see.

Yeah, my brain, my hand are telling me I want it somewhere down here. So we're just gonna go and we'll pop it, kind of pop in here, I guess. So we have a bit of that whimsiness with the touch of pink on there. Pretty cool. Oh, so it has texture. I would have thought smooth. I prefer textured paper. Yeah, so this is cold press watercolor paper. Any, anytime you guys see paper and it says cold press, that means there's gonna be some kind of a texture on it. If you— if it says hot press, hot press means it's smooth, so there would be no texture. I use hot press once in a while. But I really do prefer the textured paper because for me the texture just adds another layer of interest that I can, you know, have on the sketch. Yeah, hot press watercolor paper is smooth. Awesome, thank you, Linda. That's exactly right. You guys are good, you know your stuff. All right, let's throw down a little bit more color. I'm gonna wrap in about— let's see how long— I'm gonna wrap in a couple minutes here, and I'll be back on at some point this weekend for sure. But I thought it'd be fun to pop on just for a few minutes today and give a quick thank you to you guys and sketch something because I haven't sketched in a while. Well, I haven't sketched live in a while, I should say. I'm gonna— I want to get some intense— intensify this lemon yellow a little bit. So I'm just going to dig in. Do you dig in? I don't know. Do you dig into watercolor? Dip in? I'm going to dip into the watercolor.

That sounds better.

And this is barely any water. It's really, really thick on here. Probably see it there, right? I actually do want to add a touch of water just so it flows a little bit. There we go. Now let's touch it a little bit here. This square will flow a little bit. I'll probably come back in— let me zoom in and show you. I might come in with a pen and just pull out some of these windows a little more. When I added the color on top, I lost a little bit of that line work. And you can always come back in and throw the lines back in if you want. So don't be afraid of going over it too thick. There we go. I kind of like the way that's popping now. Turn it. There you go, so you can see better. Uh, I'm self-taught, love playing with art supplies. Yeah, so, uh, I'm also self-taught, to be honest with you. I've— I haven't— I didn't have any art classes in this stuff, so I'm with you. I'm also self-taught. I learned to sketch buildings buildings in architecture school. So that's where my love of architecture— well, love with sketching buildings started in college. So I've been sketching buildings ever since then. Actually, even before then, I would do drawings of houses and things. But as far as watercolor and ink washing and all that, I just— it's just being— it's about being playful and trying things, right? Like you said, Nan's Life 7 said, I love playing with art supplies. That's what it's about, it's a mindset, guys. I'm just throwing a little bit of yellow in here. There we go. I just want to create a little bit of movement here, so I thought it'd be kind of fun to fleck in a little bit of, uh, blue there. It's kind of a little— just a little fleck, like a little— a little swish. All right, awesome. I don't— all right, I'm gonna put the paintbrush down. I don't want to overdo it. Sometimes I get the question like, how do you know when to stop? It's really just kind of a gut feeling, to be honest with you. Um, when I find I'm starting to get fussy with the sketch and I'm looking and trying to invent things to do to it, that for me is a cue to stop. If it's just not happening and I'm forcing things, that's a really good stopping point. Um, I do know that I want to pull out some of these ink lines here, so we can go ahead and do that. I'm going to use my Pilot pen. Here's another pen I love to sketch with. I love using Pilot, um, the Precise V7. There's also V5s. I think there's— I'm sure they have other sizes. Great pens for sketching. So let's use this. I want to just— I think I want to add a little bit more, um, indicate some— a little bit more window kind of things happening. The Pilot will write on the wet area, the damp area, and a Pilot pen will bleed. I think if— I think if it sits for a few minutes, it won't bleed as much. But I just want to— I just want to pull out some of these lines in here on the Skybridge area. There we go, something like that.

Cool.

Actually, I might just use the Pilot to— I talked about pulling out the edges of these buildings. I think I'm going to use the pilot pen. Just kind of go down over these edges here, pull the silhouette of the building out.

See if that—

see if that helps a little bit. Pull out this area. Let me go underneath the bridge. Let's kind of just sketch this. Boom, boom. There we go. So Just pull that silhouette of the building a little bit. There. Cool. Awesome, awesome. Alright guys, I think I'm gonna leave it at this for now. I probably will come back after it dries and just maybe add a little more ink, black ink in places, and pull things out. And I might add a little bit of hatching. If you don't know what hatching is, hatching really is— on this sketch here, you know, hatching is adding line work to create kind of shadows. So let's just do some hatching here. I'm just gonna do vertical lines here, vertical. You can do angled lines as well. Like I did here. And hatching is a great way to just add some shadows and depth. Yeah, I guess that's good. Let's see, I'll throw some here. So I might come back and throw some hatching on this here after it dries. Cool. All right guys, let me know if you have any questions before I head out, any comments. Thank you for the thumbs up, I appreciate that. I see a thumbs up out there, um, I always appreciate that. Thank you guys for liking this and sharing it, I appreciate it. Again, thank you to everybody that's helped, you know, help me get to the 500+ mark on YouTube. Awesome. We'll do like a little special celebration sometime this weekend. And, um, I'm thinking I'm gonna do a little sketch, some kind of sketch giveaway. So we'll see how that goes. Cameron Nicholas says, have a good evening. Hey Cameron, thank you so much. You have an awesome evening as well. I always appreciate you. Linda says, looks great, Jason. Thank you for sharing. I need to go have my watercolor class at 9. Enjoy your watercolor class, Linda. Keep on creating awesome stuff. It's fantastic. Love to hear that. And Nan's Life was great having you in here, and thank you for your comments and your positivity. I hope to see you back on our stream. That would be fun. Have a good evening, everyone. Thanks, @InspireLife. Look forward to your next. Thank you so much. And everybody else that's watching, thank you. I appreciate you all. You're amazing. Uh, what a fun way to kind of wrap or wind down my day here. Keep being creative, keep spreading positivity through creativity, okay? And, um, yeah, I appreciate you guys. I'll be back on— I'll probably be on tomorrow night again. Take care, guys. Thanks again and peace. Live creatively. I'll see you guys soon. Take care. Usually wave with my left hand so I can hit the finish button with my right hand. Let's do that. There we go, I found it. Good night, guys. Take care.