The INKspired Life - architectural sketching

[MUSIC] Everybody, happy Sunday! Hope you're doing well out there. I'm on for a few minutes, just gonna do some quick sketching here. I haven't done any sketching today. And sometimes I feel lost when I don't sketch. So, it's gonna be fast and loose. Just gonna outline a couple things here. Maybe throw down some color, see where it goes. This is a— this will be a New York City Inkspired sketch. See what I did there? Inkspired? Hope you're doing well. And let's throw— let's see. Hey, I see Linda is joining us on Facebook. Hey Linda, how the heck are you? Hope all is well. So I hope everybody's having a great day today. Happy Sunday. This day kind of, kind of flew by, unfortunately. I wish Sundays would slow down sometimes. Gotta feel like I'm just getting caught up on things and Monday is around the corner. I love, I love teaching. I love I do, but heck, I could use a 3-day weekend once in a while just to catch up on life. You guys know what I mean? So for me, sketching is a way of just catching up with my creative side. I love sketching. I could sketch 24/7, especially architecture. That's my game, and it just makes me feel, uh, just transported me to another place when I can do quick style architectural sketching. Hope you guys can see what I'm sketching here. It is great to see you on— I see a couple people tuned in on Instagram. I don't know if you're still watching or not. If you're still on Insta, I saw Laura and DRT— I can't read it all, I apologize. DRT Jong, sorry if I'm missing. Some letters there. Hope you're doing well if you're still out there on the Insta watching. So we have the Empire State Building happening, and then we got this big kind of building in the foreground here. It does something like that.

There we go.

This is actually a traffic light that's kind of way in the foreground. Got a street sign happening here. Let's see what else we have. These wires kind of coming down like this. Again, this is just fast and loose and quick, just for fun. I'm not trying to do anything realistic. I'm never trying to recreate a photograph. I don't— that's just not the kind of style I like. Just quick, fast, loose sketches to capture a feeling or impression of a place or a building. There are amazing, amazing gifted artists out there who can draw photorealistic paint photorealistically, and that's awesome. Cool. All right, I have enough, I think, of an outline going. Let's sketch— let's not sketch, let's throw down some color. Let's have fun with this. Hey, Karen says Karen, great to see you. Linda H is on, uh, the YouTubes. How you doing over there on the YouTube? It's great to see you guys are awesome. I'm so glad you're popping on.

I wasn't sure if I was going to be on tonight.

I, um, have some quote-unquote real work to do. I'm taking an online course right now, uh, and I have some architecture stuff I need to be working on and wrapping up. So busy, busy, but there's always time for sketching. All right, let's see. Um, let's just throw down some watercolor, I think, just for fun. So I'm gonna grab my watercolor palette. No plan, no game. We're just gonna pick what we're feeling like and throw down some color. Hey Jason Nicholas says Karen, thank you for the stars. Karen, I appreciate that. I know you send stars over on Facebook to me and I want to thank you. With your stars, um, I was able to get— yeah, how much— but I was able to save up and get some, uh, some supplies. I think I got like a couple of colored pencils or something, but I really do appreciate doing that. So thank you so much. Hey, Jason is in the house. He says, hey Jason. I'm saying, hey Jason back. How should we do this? We got this here. I'm going to try to hold the palette off the side a little bit. Again, I'm just dipping and going, guys. I'm just throwing down color just for fun. You can see my water is dirty. Here it is. I have not changed this in about 3 weeks now, and it's okay. I love, I love working with the dirty one. Let's throw down some colors. Let's go with— I'm going to go with some orange. I might have to dip into my other watercolor palette because I think the orange is almost gone. Orange, orange you glad? Orange you glad I'm using orange? Hey, Chip's in the house! Hey brother, love the sketching, Chip. Chip's been doing some pretty kick-ass sketching, Chip. Good stuff. Um, thank you, so great to see you, Chip. Hey Linda, Linda, um, S— Linda S, if you're on Facebook still, let me know. I have one of your tinies right here and I'd like to show everybody. About it.

You're—

how awesome your tiny sketches are, guys. I'm literally not even thinking about the colors I'm throwing down. I'm just grabbing and going, having a clear mind. Wherever the brush is going, awesome. It may look great, may look muddy. I don't know where it's gonna go, and that's the fun. I'm not I'm just going with it. Um, nice sketch. Hey, thank you. Yeah, it's getting there. It's just I kind of lightly just lined, blocked it up. Hopefully you guys can tell this is the Empire State Building. I definitely want to capture the ESB, as the cool people say. The ESB, Empire State Building. I guess I just made myself one of the cool people. Somehow, somehow I did. I hope that's allowed. Um, oh my gosh, I've lost my brain, I've lost my mind. Hey, Linda says I am here. Hey, Linda S, cool. Hey guys, let me just put this down for a sec. Linda S is over there on Facebook. She's awesome, um, such a great creative friend. I really, really appreciate Linda. I appreciate all you guys on here. Some I've known longer and I've done Zoom workshops with. Karen and Linda, you guys, I would love our workshops. Anyway, here we go. Ta-da! This is Linda S. Does amazing tinies. This blows my mind. I hope it's clear. If it's not, I apologize. Check this out. Wow, right? I'm gonna get closer. It might be out of focus. Sorry about that. Um, Linda, I don't know how you do it. That's— the detail in such a small amount of space is staggering. So, um, I found— I just found that I was cleaning some stuff up and it's right here on my art desk now. So not really a desk, my art table, or I don't know what it's like. What should I call this thing? Workplace? My art station? Creative zone? Let's call it the creative zone. Dipping into this, this is almost like a school bus yellow color. Digging it, actually. So guys, yeah, don't be afraid just to grab and go and have fun with colors. It's pretty awesome. Char says wow. Oh, so glad you like it. Oh yeah, what is not to like about it? That tiny is really cool. All right, let's dip in again. We're just dipping and going, guys. Is this some kind of blue I just gathered here? I'm just— this is just watercolor I'm throwing down tonight. I don't have any ink on here. I'm actually going to blot. I don't usually blot too much when I'm painting. Oh, I move my tiny here, right there. I'm gonna blot a little bit here. I want to pull that back.

I'll try to get—

I want to try to get some more just pure blue. I'm going to really load up the blue here. You can see that I am a— I don't know how you guys load paint on your brush. I'm a spinner. I, I tend to just spin my brush like this to get the paint on. And some people, you can do this as well. I like to spin it on. And when by spinning it, sometimes it helps to sharpen up the point a little bit. I don't know if I made that up or if that's a real thing, but I spin it in there. There we go. I just want that blue to really pop. And I'm left-handed, so I should have the palette on my left, but I'm holding it in my right. I'm all over the place. My brain's in rapid fire. Why? Because I'm so excited. I love doing this. It's got me hyped up.

All right, cool.

All right, hopefully you guys can see this coming together. I like what's happening here, pretty interesting. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, thoughts, feedback. 49ers scored 34 and Lions 24. Oh, is that the game? Is that the final result? 49ers won, man! Congrats to anybody that was rooting for the 49ers. That's awesome. So that means my son will be home soon too. He's out hanging at one of his friends' house. Karen, thanks for sharing that 4. So silly question, guys. I guess the 49ers— who are they playing? Who won the other game? I'm really out of touch with football scene. I am curious. Was it the Ravens or the Chiefs, right? I think they were playing today. I forget who won. That's awesome. It's looking cool. What do you guys think? You like the colors? I want some more intense orange, so I'm gonna really go back to that spinning technique. We're gonna clean this pan up in here. We're gonna bring it home. I do have another watercolor— Winsor Newton watercolor palette that has, I think, a full orange in it, but grab and go with this. There we go. I'm just— see, I just threw it on there really thick. Gotta be careful. I'm a little bit too much.

There we go.

That's cool. We'll let that kind of bleed together. I want to throw some of the orange over here. We have some here. Let's bring a little bit down in here, maybe. And we'll kind of come around and bridge these together. So I'm just going to touch the two colors with water, let them kind of bridge. And let's throw some orange. We need some down in here.

There we go.

Let's kind of bridge that across. Awesome. I love bridging colors. I don't normally watch football, but they're, they're right here in Santa Clara. Hey, there you go, your hometown team! Way to go, that's so awesome. Very, very cool. All right, still just painting with my gut. My gut says grab some red. We're gonna throw red in here. Yes, we are going for some red.

Hmm.

Oh, he did it! He threw red there. What's he thinking? You crazy? That guy crazy. He did just throw some red there. I'm living in crazy town. My brain's in crazy town right now. Um, I don't want to get too crazy with the red, but I do want to pop some here as well.

Cool.

I'm going to zoom in so you guys can see this closer. There you go. Let me know what you guys think. Do you like the colors? Are you getting a vibrant kind of sense from this? Maybe some energy? I'm really trying to get a sense of energy on this with the color. Grab a drink here. Retro's in the house, guys. Here's Retro. Orange looks good now. "Put it in a compliment." "Orange looks good now. Put it in a compliment." I could do that. "Hey Orange, I really like the hat you're wearing tonight." So I just complimented Orange.

Yeah.

I don't know if that— I think I heard some groans for that one. "All your teams are out." Oh, Lind, I'm so sorry. That stinks. I haven't followed— I really haven't followed sports in quite a few years. I used to be an avid, avid football fan back when Terry Bradshaw— you guys remember the football, the Pittsburgh Steelers, when they had Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann, Franco Harris, Chuck Noll? Was he the coach. That's when I used to watch football way back. Hey, I see, um, we have Sherry in the house. Sherry says, love it. Hey, thank you, Sherry, over on YouTube. I appreciate that. Very cool. Linda says, hello, Sherry. Hey, we have 26— I can't read the whole thing. Pirate King, 26 Pirate King. Um, thank you over there on YouTube. It says, uh, Nice, thank you so much. I appreciate you guys. Jason Nicholas on YouTube. If you're on YouTube and you like what I'm doing, I would love for you to hit the like button, give me, you know, the thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed, I'd love for you to subscribe. Hoping to reach 1,000 subscribers by the end of February. That would be so cool. I'm just over 600. Hey, Chip says green and yellow is a great combo on the building. Yeah, let me zoom in on that again, right?

I'm kind of—

I kind of like what's happening here. This kind of bridges down. I'm liking this connection. There's a lot of fun things happening. I just grabbed a little bit more red. I'm gonna pop— I want to really hit it hard there and just kind of here as well. Gonna intensify a little bit. All right, my music's too loud, let me know. Um, really cool. So I like where this is headed. Again, I'm just grabbing and going, guys. I'm just playing with whatever colors are on my palette, whatever my gut's telling me. My gut is telling me— I think you guys probably— the closer view is better, right? Now that I look at it, let's keep it close up. Hey, Sherry says saying hi out there. Awesome, very nice colors. Karen says thank you. You guys are amazing. Love you guys talking to each other out there on the, on the tube. So I'm going to grab some more of this like school bus yellow color. That's as technical as I get with color names. It looks like school bus yellow to me. Does. Let's just— I want to kind of deepen it up here a little bit. So that School Bus Yellow mixed with the red, we get kind of a cool orange happening there. I think I'm pretty good with the color on here for now. My next step would be to actually— let me throw some Lemon Yellow. Lemon Yellow for me adds a sense of zestiness or brightness. I want to pop some of that brightness here, make it a little more intense. I want to do some more up here as well. And usually I like to put it in maybe 3 places. You got 1, 2, 3. Maybe we'll throw some here.

All right, cool.

All right. Pretty awesome. Hope you guys are liking this. My next step after this gets some dry time, we're gonna come back with some— the Sharpie, my fave Sharpie. I love Sharpies. We'll add some more detail, pull out some of the buildings. That'd be a lot of fun. If I don't use a Sharpie, or I might use— I may also use my Pilot pen here as well. These are my two favorites for just adding details on And it says, looks cool. Hey, thank you, Wanda, that's awesome, I appreciate that. See if we can throw down some detail while it's drying. It was— pull out some of the lines of the Empire State Building here. So I'm holding the pen a little too close to the barrel, so I'm going to move my hand away. Towards this end so it's not so close to here. That way, looser lines will happen. My wrist will be more flexible. And again, I like that really loose sketchy style. I like it for a few reasons. One is just, um, my brain sometimes really, really quick, fast when I'm sketching, so that just comes out naturally loose. Um, also I learned in college when I was in architecture school, I had to be really quick with my sketches to get feedback from my professors or they'd be on to the next student. So I kind of developed some fast sketching back then. Um, also when you sketch loose, you're not worried about being precise, you're not worried about making a mistake, at least for me. These lines are crazy, they're wonky, they cross each other. I love that. If I was doing an architectural blueprint, yeah, that's my time in life to be really accurate and precise, right? Well, we have— I have the computer and I use CAD software for that now, but back in the day I would draw everything for architecture plans the old school way with a pencil and a T-square and a triangle and all that fun stuff. And I— that is an art form, let me tell you. I would love to come back and do some of that. But yeah, loose and wonky is great because I don't feel like I can make mistakes. So here I'm just going to throw in some hatch lines here. I'll zoom in even closer and hatch lines. I just want to give some idea of shadow or maybe some depth happening on some of this stuff. Water towers here, or water tower. I gotta be careful because I'm left-handed, so we get this happening, my palm and things. Yeah, so usually I would do— wait for this to dry a little bit more, but since I have you guys watching I figured I'd try to throw down some ink on here. Windows, right? So these are just some quick windows happening here on the Empire State Building. Am I counting the windows? Nope. Do I even know how many are across here? I, I could look at the photograph and count, but just, just to give you the idea that this is a building that has windows on it, right? So you can see it getting a little more texture to it. Linda says yes, pen detail. Yeah, so you guys kind of know my system, right? How I like to do this. I am— I do think I'm going to stop here though. It's pretty wet and I don't want to really muck it up. It's not art unless— what? It's not art unless you wear it.

Ta-da!

Wearing some right here. It's officially artwork. Cha-ching! Hey, you guys are awesome. Let me know if you have any final questions or comments because I'm going to wrap. I do have school tomorrow. So you can kind of see this paper, if you're wondering, is 1264 Fabriano cold press. 140 pounds, and I really just like this for doing these kinds of quick sketches, watercolors, ink. That's kind of— I like, just like the texture on it. I know it's a very predictable texture, very machined texture, but I still like it. I love the colors happening on this. It's— this is fun. We'll zoom in before I head out so you can see it a little closer up. And let me get out a black frame. I like to do this too. Uh, I'm here. Oh, I forgot I have bigger frames out, didn't I?

One day.

Come on, Zach, let's see. I have this one. We'll try these two. All right, so we're gonna zoom in as I wrap up. You can see a close-up, get mostly on camera there. I think you can see it pretty good. Looks awesome. So I just have these kind of pre-cut mat things. I like to sometimes just hold them over pieces of the painting to see how they look. Look. We're just in that part of it.

It's kind of cool.

Let's get the ESB here. Remember ESB? What does ESB stand for? If you are listening, let me know. What does ESB stand for? There you go. Kind of cool. You can see the ESB there in the frame. Um, I have this bigger one square, but we'll see. Rhythm's map kind of part of it out here. This actually looks cool square. Let me zoom out. This actually would look kind of interesting, uh, square. I think I like it this way. ESB! Empire State Building— ding-ding-ding-ding! Karen and Lindy both got it. Awesome! I got a QQQ. Hey, Sherry got it! Empire State Building. Kudos to you guys, you're all paying attention. Love it, love it. I see a QQQ from Linda. Will you ever go back to the tan color for the sky? OMG, I'm trying to remember what did I use for the tan color. It's been so long. Was it watercolor? Great question, Linda. I'm trying to use what I— what I use for the tan color. I'm drawing a blank. Was it, um, let's see, I've used walnut ink for the— for the sky. I've used, um, Obviously I've used blue watercolor paints and inks. Wowzers, I am trying to remember what I used for the tan. If you remember, let me know. Drawn a blank. The blue on both sides balance it. Yeah, right, we have the blue here. What's really going to make this pop— it pop is after it dries and I come back with the Sharpie and just pull out like some of these details like this streetlight here, traffic light. I'm gonna pop it out more. I'm gonna pop out the Empire State Building silhouettes. So it really needs another layer on here to make it read better. You guys are awesome. Any other questions, let me know. I'm gonna do very soon— you guys remember when I do the mystery art giveaways? Um, so, well, not giveaways. What do you call it? The mystery art. I guess it's like a random drawing. When I put the art pieces out, you can't see them, and then if you're willing to pay for shipping on them or postage, you know the game. If you don't know it, we'll be doing that soon. I have a lot of artwork accumulating. I'm gonna follow in the footsteps of my friend Rue, who has encouraged me me in the past to do an online auction. I have so many New York City sketches here. I have probably 60 at least. I'm going to start, I think, auctioning some of these pieces off. Really cool. And I'm going to make prints of these and see them in, you know, calendars and things like that. I'm trying to think of that tan. It's driving me cray cray. The only thing I could think— I mean, I have— I don't think I would have used watercolor. I think this could use like a background here, color on it. Yeah, you got me thinking, which is good. I love creative collaboration. I think I got to think about that. Awesome. If anybody's interested in sketching along with me next weekend online, let me know. Might just do it kind of an informal workshop leading up to the formal workshops that are going to start in March, and I wanted to kind of get back on into it and practice. So I mean, I have this tan— Linda, I know I'm all over the place, guys, sorry, my brain goes. I have this color tan. I don't know if this would what you're talking about. I'm gonna throw this down. Let's throw some down here. I don't know if this is the color you're talking about. It's in my watercolor palette. I don't even know what the color is called. Is this ochre? This might be ochre. So, I don't know if you're thinking that's the color, let me know. I also haven't used my watercolor markers in a while. Sepia, sepia might be the other color. I used to use sepia a lot. That might be it. Oh, workshops, yeah, yeah, yeah. So starting in March, I'm gonna have some loose style architecture workshops. Architectural sketching workshops. We're going to focus on the subject of New York City. You guys, that's near and dear to my heart. So, be on the lookout. I'll start promoting it in February and we'll do, um, kind of like we did last time. We'll have some Zoom stuff, show-and-tell Zoom stuff and some weekly prompts. So, if you're interested, that would be great. I'd love to have you guys join me for it. Yeah, so I don't know if this is the color sepia. Oh, all right. Well, let me bring out the sepia. I have the— I have it right here.

Ta-da!

So it was probably was the sepia Winsor Newton. Watercolor marker. I love these. So here's what I would do. I would take the sepia marker. Notice I'm putting it on the board here, and then I'm just going to lift the color right off the board and put it on here. So that might be the color. Let me know. So I could— if I do it this way and then brush it, see what happens. This is why I don't put the, um, the watercolor marker right on the paper, is you can kind of see the outline of where I put it down. That's why I'd rather just put it on my board kind of just lift it off. Oh, I just splattered some. That's cool. And then paint it on. So it might be the sepia color, and if you like that, I'll throw some on here. Yes, sepia, I think that's it. Linda says yes. Karen says yes. Linda says no, this is too brown. Sherry says, did you use tan paper? Uh, great question. No, probably not. Most likely it was watercolor paper, white. It's funny you said that though. I do have some paper here that's kind of tan color. It's kind of scrap paper, man. I am, I am drawing a blank, guys. See, I think that's All right. You know what, guys? Just since you're sticking around, let's do some bonus time here. I'm going to go ahead and throw— let's do some of that sepia background on here. Why not? So thank you for Linda for bringing it up. Here we go. I'm actually going to tilt this down. Zoom in. And we're going to throw some of that sepia on here, and I'm going to do it the way I showed you, just lift the sepia off the board. And we'll see how it goes. I might even just kind of throw in— let's just throw in some water here. You can see I'm kind of just throwing down the water. I want to just loosely guide See, you're where to go.

All right, all right, I'm just grabbing that sepia, just put it on there.

I appreciate the suggestion, Linda. Thank you. I've been, I've been tending to leave the backgrounds white on these, uh, no particular reason. So this will dry, this will dry better than it's looking right now. Switch the playlist up here. Wrap up. And I'll flip it the other way so you guys can see it. All right, let's flip it around. Um, can you see that? There you go. So that's the sepia color in the background. Hey, 26 Ira King, got it to work tomorrow. Have a great night. Thank you for tuning in. Again. I appreciate that so much. And this is bye, 26. The first one was too brown. It was either sepia or the magic water. Oh yeah, magic. Yeah, remember the mystery water? I had stuff growing in it because it was sitting around for how long? And then I opened it and it smelled really bad. This was, uh, last year or the year before. Could have been the mystery water. I think this might be it. It's actually— I like it. Zoom out so you can see it further. What's kind of cool about it is it's setting an atmosphere, is it's giving it more. Yeah, like a gray fall day type of setting, which is kind of cool. So I like it. Thank you for— thank you for the suggestion. Change the feel of the painting. Yeah, it does, right? Fog. Yeah, it's like a foggy eeriness to it. I'm liking it. Let me know, do you guys like that? You like the atmosphere on here? Where's that black frame? I put this frame on it. It actually looks really nice with the frame.

Yeah.

I'm liking this one, guys. And I'm going to leave this white, white space here. I'm going to leave the white space here as well. And I'm going to leave that white too. Awesome. Change the feel of the painting. I like it with the blue. Totally different feel. Yeah. Thank you, guys. But it says, I like it with the blue. Oh, do you like— you mean you like this with the blue on the painting. I'm just letting gravity move it around a little bit. I like how it's mushrooming here, these little pops. All right, you guys go. My light behind me just turned off. That means it's 10 o'clock. Cherry says, very nice. Thank you so much. Yes, very totally different feel. I agree with you guys. All right. It is time to start wrapping. Now, one last thought about this. So I'm still going to come back and add the Sharpie and add some of the outlines and pull some of these out more. So I don't know if I'll do that live. Probably not, but I'll definitely post the final. Yes, to blue in the painting. Thank you, Linda. Hey guys, you are awesome. I appreciate you all so, so much. Thank you for watching. Thank you for liking. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for listening to me stammer my way through this unrehearsed, unedited show. Hopefully you guys got something good out of it. I know I did, and I appreciate you guys always being there for support and inspiration. Have an amazing rest of your Sunday. Have an amazing Monday and Tuesday. No, I was— I got distracted. I was looking at some ink down here. I'm like, no, I'm not going to throw any on there. Um, have a great Monday. Karen says good night. Thank you, Karen. Appreciate you watching. Linda, Sherry, thank you. Cheers to you as well. Uh, who else is out there? Linda H. You're awesome. I appreciate you so much. Linda S. All the Lindas. I guess anybody has the name Linda must be awesome. Head 28th, Pirate King watching. That's so cool. Chip, always great seeing you, man. You are amazing. Thank you, guys. If you do leave me stars on Facebook, that's so cool. I don't get a notification live if anybody does that, so I apologize if I know Karen does a lot and I just don't, I don't see it live. I do appreciate all that you guys do. Thank you so much. I was distracted with the music. Take care, guys. Have a great, great rest of your night. Peace and live creatively. See you real soon. Take care. I can't see myself on the camera. And no, I did not do my— fun evening. Yeah, it was fun. I love seeing you guys here. The workshops are gonna be even more fun because we could see each other in Zoomland, or I might do a different platform, but it'll be virtual land. Keep that in mind for March, guys. Take care. I am looking for the finish button, which is behind a bunch of screens here. Got it. Good night, guys.