The Inkspired Life - Architectural Sketching

Artist Jason Nicholas sketches Disney's Haunted Mansion live using a Lamy fountain pen and Moleskine sketchbook, demonstrating architectural detailing, ink washes, and hatching while sharing stories about Disney Imagineering and the importance of keeping a creative mindset.
Chapters
Hey everybody, happy Friday, October 13th. I just realized it's Friday the 13th, and with a name like Jason, that's a great day, right? You guys know the Friday the 13th movie? Anyway, hope you guys are doing well. I'm gonna pop on for a few minutes and do some sketching. I see Angel. Hey, how are you? Long time no see. Hope you're doing well. You guys are awesome. I was just doing some scribbling here just to kind of warm up. I just refilled my Lamy pen with some ink and I just wanted to get it going and make sure it's coming out okay. Anyway, hope you guys are doing well. So I'm going to sketch, let's see, I think tonight I'm gonna sketch the Disney Haunted Mansion building. Let me bring out a picture of it here. So I'm kind of looking at this reference image. Hey, Dawn's in the house. Dawn, great to see you. Hope all's well. So this is the Disney Haunted Mansion. At Walt Disney World. Figured Halloween's coming up, might be a cool time to sketch this. So, I'm just going to loosely base my sketch on this image here and we'll see where it goes. Let me know how you guys are doing out there in video land. Also let me know if you can hear me okay, if I'm talking too loud or if my music's too loud. It's always good feedback for me. Let's get— let's zoom up. All right, let's try that. Very cool. So I am using my Lamy ink and I'm sketching in my Moleskine. Moleskine. I think that's how you say it. Moleskine. That's how I say it. Book, which I love. This is a watercolor— has watercolor paper in it. I love this paper. I have a lot of these. I have the small travel size ones as well that I carry. Actually, grab one, I'll show you. This is, uh, this is my favorite size Moleskine. I hit the wrong button. Here we are. This is my smaller size. I carry this whenever I go on location. Whenever I go to New York City, I'm always carrying this. When I go on vacations, actually, I carried— I had this one in Disney. You could see I did a sketch there at Disney one day. About— what is this? This is the Galaxy's Edge Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios. But yeah, so I love, I love these books. The hardcover is great, has this cool elastic band. Good stuff. Anyway, let's do some sketching. Let me know, how are you guys doing out there? In video land. I always want to know what you're up to. All right, let's— I actually, um, I sketched this once a long time ago, but let's just do a quick loose version of it. You guys know my style by now. I'm never trying to duplicate the photograph. Just kind of putting my spin on what I'm seeing. This is a really cool building, and what's fun about it, if I remember correctly, the ride— so this is a ride at Disney, an attraction— and the ride, I believe, is all underneath this, kind of underground. So the building you're looking at is merely, um, are mostly cosmetic. So the ride is not— it's kind of— I should give a spoiler alert— the ride is really not— does not go through the house. It's kind of an illusion, but that's Disney magic. I've— I would love to have been a Disney Imagineer and help design some of these rides and theme parks. That would have been so awesome. There's also a— there's a haunted mansion in Disneyland in California. That's a different style building than this one, and I believe there's one in the— what is it, the Tokyo? Is there a Disneyland Tokyo? One in Tokyo, one in Paris— or France, I'm sorry. They all have their own kind of unique take on the architecture. I believe they just actually made— came out with a new movie, Haunted Mansion movie, which I have not seen. I'm only gonna get part of the building in, and that's fine. And I'll probably do some wash, like a little— so add some water and we'll bleed some of this ink a little bit. So I'm thinking too much. There we go. Let's get a little looser with this. So you can— I kind of start with the roof area here. Now let's kind of add this piece as part of the building. Got some stone. This is called coining. These kind of stacked stones at the corner are coins. Q-U-O-I-N. Coin is what they're called. See, I learned some stuff in architecture school. All right, we got this cool kind of glass structure here, the conservatory that comes out. It's rounded, so I'm going to do some kind of contour lines here to give it that look. It's really not rounded, it's more— it's segmented. Cool. Some kind of columns up here on this dome. My eye is just jumping around now. I'm just kind of sketching things that are popping out to me. Let's see, we got some entry thing happening here. There we go, I think we have kind of the outline. So Don says, my dad was an electrician on the Hall of Presidents when it was built. He had all these amazing photos of the presidents with the electronics exposed. Oh, Don, that is so cool! I love that. How exciting! So your dad got the inside peek. Um, the Hall of Presidents is actually really fascinating how they recreated the presidents using the animatronics. Um, really, really interesting. So Disney, you know, you know, kind of pioneered that whole animatronic character thing. I love it. That's a great story. Thank you for sharing. All right, cool. Let's do some of this, and then we're gonna bleed this. So Lamy ink's gonna bleed nice. We're just gonna do some water on here and give it a wash, and we'll see what happens. Just want to add some of these lines. So normally I'm actually doing something kind of different. Normally I'll start with a Sharpie, as you guys know. Um, I usually start with the Sharpie because if I'm going to come back and add an ink wash, or if I'm going to add some water on this, the Sharpie's not going to bleed. The Lamy ink's going to definitely bleed. But I figured it's a haunted mansion, let's make it kind of dark and creepy. Like me, I'm dark and creepy. No, I— well, I hope, I hope I'm not. Alright, cool. Alright, let's add some water. I'm gonna use, uh, I have a brush. I actually have some dirty water. Let's just wash it and see what happens. I have a tissue here. I can wipe this off, or a napkin or something, whatever this is. Alright. I like the way the Lamy ink bleeds. It has a nice kind of purplish— let me zoom in a little bit. Sometimes you get a nice purplish color that comes out of it. You can kind of see here. Cool. Yeah, let me zoom in on this part. You can kind of see here, I don't know if it's showing up on camera, but it actually has a purple kind of tint to it here. And actually this area as well, which I really like. I'm not going to go too crazy. I don't want to muck it up too much, so we'll leave it at that. And let's just take our Lamy and go over some of the wet areas. We'll let it bleed a little bit. So the Lamy doesn't really like to wet— to write on the wet areas too much. Let's just show some bricks. To show brick, I'm just going to do really light horizontal lines across here. There's a lot of brickwork on this building. This will add some texture. There's a window here. We'll just— I'll throw some Lamy ink. We're gonna bleed that, and I actually want to pop this edge out a little bit. So let's bleed this a little bit. There we go. I'm actually going to take some of that ink and bring it up here. Cool. That's more texture, some brickwork here. This is really kind of in perspective, so it's going to angle this a little bit here just to give it the idea that it's kind of angling there. I'm not worried about the particular angle. It's not perfect. It's not matching the photo, and that's okay. This is an entryway, so I kind of want to darken this up here a lot more. Pull some of these coins out a little bit. Cool. All right, there you go. So that's kind of a quick, uh, look at the Disney Haunted Mansion. Hey, Linda H is in the house! Linda, hope you're doing well. You pop on. This is a really cool building. If you study in detail, there's really cool architectural elements and stuff on it. But my objective intention was really just to capture kind of— I like the silhouette here. I'm gonna add some hatch lines here just to give some— the idea of shadows, or pop out some of these elements, give them some depth. I do want to pull this roofline out of the conservatory a little bit more. Because it's in the foreground, so I'm just kind of bolding up the outline of it. There's a window here. I'm just gonna kind of hatch this in a little bit just to pull the, the window area out. I'm kind of liking it. I don't know if I'm gonna add— I don't think I'm gonna add too much more other than maybe just some verticals here just to add a little more texture to show this is brickwork. I'm randomly throwing in some vertical lines, and I'm just doing a kind of a diamond grill pattern with this glass. It's kind of— it's a very gothic kind of look, cathedral kind of look. Oh, let's knock my water over. Cool, I like it. Um, I like the layers of gray and black. Thanks, Don. I like it. I'm gonna just leave it black and gray. I was toying with adding some purple to make it a little more creepy looking. Um, but I like it, the black and white. I'm going to leave it this way. Again, it's just my kind of fun interpretation of the Disney Haunted Mansion. Add these finials kind of around here, just add some little bit of detail there, pull those out. You know, what else, what else? There's kind of a cool— I can't really tell what it is. I don't know if it's a cross. It almost looks like a cross here or something on the— this part of the building. So we're just going to kind of sketch that in here on that side. Looks awesome. Thank you, Linda. I'm glad you like it. You guys are amazing. Let me know if you have other questions or comments. I'm going to wrap up in a minute or two. I popped on a little bit early Friday here. Just wanted to show you guys. I mean, I wanted to sketch live with you guys for a little bit. Kind of beat. It's been a good week, but a long week at school, so I'm kind of tired. But I definitely wanted to pop on. I don't think I've been on for a few days at least. Cool. All right guys, so that is my take on the Disney Haunted Mansion. Let's kind of write what it is. So, and I used my Lamy pen with Lamy ink. I thought it was fun. I haven't used it in a while. This is probably the first Sharpie-free sketch I've done in a long time. Sharpie-free, the man says. As I can't resist, I gotta use my Sharpie. I'm going to just write what this is here in the margin. All right, Sharpie made an appearance. Uh, I would say is— oh, I'll just put the month 10, the year 23, put it in a box, and I'll just write haunted I'm trying to get better at labeling and dating my sketches because I have so many sketchbooks here and they're, they're not dated. Um, so I go back and I'm like, okay, when did I do this one? There you go, Disney Haunted Mansion. Pretty awesome. Very fun place to visit. It is. Yeah, I love I love, um, I'm a Disney fan, so I love, I love Disney. I know a lot of people are on Disney's case these days, and I have to be honest, I stay away from all the politics, the nonsense, people complaining about the prices, this, that, and the other. Um, I'm kind of in a bubble, and I like my bubble. It keeps me happy. So I, I like Disney. It's a fun place. Yeah, and I'm hoping to go back in 2025. That's kind of our goal, is to head back then. Do one sketch. I'm going to break out my Pilot pen here. I want to add a little bit of shape to this here. Awesome. Let me know what you guys think. Let me know if you have any questions about what I sketched or what I used or how I sketched something. And should I put the pen down. Maybe I should. Awesome. Enjoy your weekend. Hey, thank you so much. Yeah, I will. Hey, you guys are, are amazing. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for liking my YouTube videos. I'm my Facebook posts. I really appreciate it. I can't grow and continue without you guys. I could continue, but I can't grow. And I really just want to reach more people just to show that it's really fun and it's not really difficult to sketch architecture. Hopefully I'm sharing some of my tips and tricks, techniques, and also mindset. Creative mindset is is a really big part of what could possibly stop us from creating and sketching. So, you know, creative mindset's a huge, huge thing. All right, guys, you're awesome. Have an amazing rest of your night. Enjoy your weekend. I might pop on Saturday night or Sunday night, I'm not sure yet. I appreciate you all so, so much. Keep paying it forward out there. Use your creativity for positivity. And yeah, thank you guys so much. Peace and live creatively. I'll see you guys soon. Take care. Peace out, Cub Scout. See ya. I gotta come up with a better exit than peace out, Cub Scout. All right, take 2. This is live, unrehearsed. We're gonna cut out the peace out, Cub Scout thing. That was kind of— I don't know, I didn't like that ending. All right, let's— what else? How could we end this? You just hit the finish button. All right guys, take care. Have an amazing, amazing, amazing rest of your day. See you soon. Yeah, I gotta work on my exit strategy, but you guys get it. See you soon.










