The INKspired Life : Brooklyn Bridge : Architectural Sketch : Livestream

Hey everybody, happy December 31st, 2023. Hope you're all doing well out there. Uh, yeah, I'm gonna be on just for a few minutes. I want to do some sketching to pass the time, hoping to stay up till that midnight hour strikes. Hope you're having a great holiday. Um, I see Kali is watching over there on Instagram. Hey Kali, how the heck are you? Hope you're doing awesome. Hopefully it's working over there on Instagram. Let me know, love some comments or feedback. I have— this is only my third time streaming live on Insta. I'm also on YouTube and Facebook right now live. So I thought it would be cool really to sketch a bridge. So you guys know I love sketching the Brooklyn Bridge. I thought it'd be a really cool thing to do to kind of bridge 2023 into 2024. Kali says, hey, Mr. Nick. Kali, it's so great to see you. Hope you're doing well. I hope the livestream— let me know if you can actually see anything on Instagram because I'm not seeing any live pictures. I am sketching right now. All right, let's start some— doing some drawing. So I'm going to sketch with a Sharpie. We're going to just kind of sketch a quick, really loose— I just kind of want to warm up a little bit here, and then I'll come back and We'll kind of resketch it a little bit, right? We'll do kind of a perspective scene here. Awesome!

Oh, awesome.

Thank you for the feedback, Callie. I appreciate that. So cool. Looks like on my end on the screen, it looks frozen. So— and I'm not talking about the Disney movie.

All right.

So I'm just sketching the Brooklyn Bridge. I want this to be a really, really loose interpretation today. I'm going to throw down some color. I have some watercolors and some ink, and we'll just throw that stuff on here and see what happens. I think that's enough of an outline.

Point— make those arches a little more pointier.

So what are your New Year's wishes, guys? What would you like to happen in 2024? Let me know. Uh, I think for me, I have— I like to use words to kind of define my new year. I don't do resolutions. And one of the words I have for this year is, um, it's simplify. I really just want to learn to simplify things. I tend to overcomplicate, um, just a lot of things, and I want to just kind of pull back, simplify a little bit. My pup is barking out there. You might hear people in the neighborhood. Who the heck knows what someone's doing? Shooting fireworks in the distance. I think she hears the fireworks. Poor pup. Yeah, I think one of my keywords will be simplify for 2024. Sounds weird to say that. 2024. All right, cool. Let's throw down some color on here. Hey, Deborah is in the house. Deborah, great to see you. Happy New Year. Deborah says agreed. Yeah, right. All right, so, um, here's what I'm gonna do. We're gonna spray down some ink. I got this really cool color, it's called Rusted Rivet, uh, and it even has sketches of— it looks like bridge parts on it. How dang cool is that, right? So let's throw some ink on here. Yeah, so I know I'm talking out loud, I'm kind of babbling. Um, what else? Simplify is probably the number one thing on my list. Um, health. Simplify and health. I really want to get myself back into, uh, good shape. Been eating way too much junk food, too much sugar, and, you know, kind of feeling it a little bit. So I think I really want to focus on my health this year. And simplifying. All right, this is that Rusted Rivet color. Love it. We're just gonna kind of splash it on here. I like to do the splatter effect, especially when I'm doing like New York City inspired sketches. New York City has a really cool vibe and energy. I was hoping to get there over the break and I didn't make it. Just wasn't feeling, uh, I was kind of, kind of sick a lot of the break I had this past— was it 7 days, 9 days? I don't do math after 8 o'clock PM. Hey, Linda H is in the house! Great to see you, hope all is well. Guys, let me know if you have any questions or comments. Um, it's always great seeing you in the chat. All right, so we have some of that Rusted Rivet color, which may be my new favorite ink color. Now I'm going to dip into the watercolors here. I'm going to grab some turquoise. If you're new to watching me, I— my goal is to really create loose style architecture sketches. I'm not trying to be realistic, um, not trying to create— recreate a photograph, um, and I'm not using the colors Typically don't use the colors that you see at these buildings or the bridge in this case. I just paint with colors that I love, make me feel good. And, um, yeah, that's kind of my style— loose, whimsical. And I kind of just paint with attitude or like feeling. Paint with attitude. I like that. Maybe my New Year's resolution should be to paint with 'tude. Sketch with Tood in 2024, brought to you by— I don't know, brought to you by Winsor Newton watercolors. I don't know, they're not a sponsor, just having fun. All right, so we got some turquoise going on there. Um, I'm liking the real loose look to this. Splatter some more paint on there. My pup. So something really cool happened last night. My dog was barking, um, actually kind of not a lot, but barking a little bit. And she was looking out the back door. I looked out there, there was an owl sitting in a tree. I have never seen an owl here. It was such a cool, cool sight to see. It was a beautiful owl. I looked it up. I'm not sure if I forgot what the name of it was, screech owl or something like that. Beautiful. It was hard to get a picture of. I did try. All right, I'm dipping into some yellow. Why? Let's zest up this drawing with a little bit of lemon— lemony freshness. Yeah, that's what we're gonna call it, lemony freshness. Not Lemony Snicket, isn't that a book? Lemony Snicket. Sorry, Callie, my puns do not stop outside of the classroom. Just saying. Sorry, I didn't warn you. Yeah, it's great to see you have Linda and Debra in the house, and Callie's over on Insta. So fun. Let's throw down some orange. I'm really digging this. And again, it's really loose, but I think you can get the sense of the Brooklyn Bridge just with the arches. That's one of the really cool features of the design of the bridge, are these gothic pointed arches. Hey, can you guys hear— can you hear my music? Let me know. I do have music playing. Just curious to know because I had to do some settings over here, a little software update. Sometimes that'll mess things up. Anybody in the tech world knows how that goes. Yeah, it's looking cool. I can hear the music. Awesome, thank you, Callie. Hey, I see Joan. Joan is on Instagram. Hey Joan, welcome! Hope you're having a great day. I know sometimes our people are watching from all over the world. I don't know if anybody out there has already had their New Year celebration. If you have, Happy New Year! All right, let me crank up the music here a little bit. So we got some arms down on there. I feel like I need a little bit of maybe blue, a little bit of darkness. I'm going to zoom in so you guys can see this. I don't know, on Instagram I'm guessing it's a vertical format and you're not seeing my entire screen, so I'll actually have to go back and watch an Instagram replay. I'm not sure. I've only started livestream on Instagram, uh, this past week. I've been doing Facebook and YouTube for a while now. All right, so I'm just dipping in here, grabbing some blue. Let's see, gonna use the blue here, I think, not for water. I'm just gonna continue the base of this bridge, kind of make it look like it's in shadow. You know what? I think we're going to make that more of a purplish color. So let's grab some red, put some blue in there and makes purple. There we go. Grab some more of that. I kind of love this Winsor Newton palette. You can see it's well-loved. And one of the cool features is it can turn into like a palette you can hold with your thumb. So I might just do that. Hey, I thank you guys. I see some thumbs ups going out there. Thank you for the thumbs up. I always appreciate you guys so much. Deborah says, I just love the colors. I can't stay watching football game with family. Hey, that's awesome! Make sure you wear your helmet when you're playing. Safety first in everything, including sports. But I appreciate you tuning in, Deborah. It was great to see you in the house. And Deborah, um, shout out to Deborah. Deborah has a really cool calendar out there with your amazing, uh, pup paintings, right? Really fun stuff. Deborah created a really— I don't have it in front of me— a really cool painting of, uh, my pup Olivia. Let me see if I can find— I know the sticker— sticker in the other room. Oh, wait, it's in the other rooms. Yeah, I know it's on my bookshelf, the other space. Cool. But there you go, right? Look at that. And I'm gonna leave it. I'm not gonna finish the bottoms here. I just like it kind of dripping and stopping. And what that does is allows the viewer to kind of use their imagination. So you guys looking at this can kind of fill in the blanks with this painting, like what's happening here and what's happening here. Right, so for me that makes it a little more interesting. Let's get more purple on here. Let's splatter some purple. I think that's enough of the splatters. Um, what should we add on here next? Let it dry for a sec. I'll zoom in a little closer so you can see some of the details of how it's looking. So especially in here, I love the way these colors are drying. Hey, Karen's in the house. Happy New Year, Karen. Awesome to see you. Karen's over on our West Coast. It's like, what, 6 o'clock there? So we're a little— hey, wait, so that means I'll have 2024 before you do. Wait, is that true? But how does that work? This is a dumb question. So when it turns 12 o'clock here on the East Coast, it'll be 9 o'clock on the West Coast. Do you wait until it's 12 o'clock on the West Coast, or do you guys go with the time on the East Coast? And if I just confused the heck out of you, um, consider that extra. I'm not charging you extra, you know, an extra fee for that. This is a free show. I don't know if that made any sense. I really— I don't know the answer. Um, I want to throw some more turquoise on here, but I'm going to really thicken it up. I feel like I want to change the tunes up a little. I have a playlist here of— these are songs I have to pay for to use. I have— I use service called Epidemic Sound, um, so I can place these soon, these tunes without copyright issues. I'm just scrolling through some here. Yes, you will. Time on the East Coast. Oh, awesome, got you. Thank you. Now I know the answer to that burning question. So look at the turquoise I just threw on here. Put it really thick on the brush. Let's pull out some of these cables here with this turquoise. D-Ray, loving that turquoise. Hey, D-Ray, awesome, great to see you. So cool. Let me know, you guys digging this painting? I have— actually, I'm going to show you something really cool that I set up before. I want to show you guys the wall— not the wall, but kind of the, the Post-it board or whiteboard I have here with all my— not all of them, this is unrehearsed, unscripted— um, with about 40 of my New York City sketches. So I'm going to change the camera view so you guys can check that out. Let's do that. I'm gonna hit this button here. Ta-da! So there you go. So that view— I can even go over there if I want— but that view over there is the wall, or I should say the whiteboard. It's magnetic, so I have all of these New York City sketches pinned up here. I I just started doing this last week or the week before. It has been so cool to see all of these sketches together in one place. I did not do the Star Wars or the Batman you see on screen. Those are really cool pieces of artwork, but they're not mine. But I did do all the New York City ones. I'm gonna go do a little point show and tell there. I did not do my hair.

Or—

I did not work out today, so pardon me, but let's see if you guys can hear me. I'll show you, uh, a couple of things over here.

So if you could see in this area here and this one here, I actually have the Brooklyn Bridge sketches I've done kind of in that section. So it's really fun for me to see the different views and the different ways I've kind of treated subject. Here's just kind of a detail of the bridge, which I really, really love.

And these, these are similar.

And this is a nice view that was sketched from Dumbo over in Brooklyn, Brooklyn area of the bridge in the background. I've probably done at least 10 more sketches. They're not all on the board. But what else is fun is to see the black and white and then the color. Sketches as well, all together.

Um, I don't—

I know it's not zoomed in on here, so I don't know how much detail you guys can see, but here's like a study I was doing of the copper building, these three and that one. Um, really cool. Here's St. Patrick's Cathedral. So, and here's a water tower. This is the shed building. This is a shed building here, another shed building.

Another view of it.

So it's just really been cool to put all these images together.

I love it, love it. Hey, Pause for Camera joined. Great to see you, Pause. Hope you're doing well. So yeah, so that's kind of, so you guys can get a sense of where I've been headed. Most of these were all done last year. There may be one or two that were done at a different time. Let's change our playlist. I'm going to put one on. Which one do I want to go to here?

Um, this one here.

It's called the World Music playlist. See where it takes us. But anyway, it's a cool view of, of everything together. So I'm going to continue adding to this, and I've been slowly selling some of these sketches. That's been a lot of fun. But enough of that. Hope you guys— did you like that field trip? I should have asked for your permission slips before we ventured, but I think we're all back on the bus. We're gonna head back home. Yeah, I think I need more of a break. Um, let's change the camera back to the desktop. Ta-da! That was fun. Hey, Karen says love it. Thank you, Karen, I appreciate that so much. And I somehow got turquoise down here. What the heck did I do? See if we can blot some of that up. If not, we'll make it work. There are no accidents, as our friend Bob Ross says, right? You only paint happy little trees, smiling sunsets, and there are only happy accidents. I love Bob Ross. He— I watched Bob Ross growing up. Uh, I was a child. Hey, I am Brett Lubansky joined. What the heck, I know that name, Brett. Liz Family, hope you guys are doing well. Happy holidays. Wow, it's really cool to see your name on there. How fun is that? Happy holidays to everybody. Yeah, but I was— I grew up watching all these cool PBS shows like Bob Ross and This Old House, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street. So yeah, I'm that kid. That's, that's kind of my background, and it really has affected who I am today, believe it or not. I'm going to throw down some more orange on here, but I just want to intensify. There is orange here. I want to just really punch it a little bit. So we're just going to punch it just a little bit there. And I think that's good for the color. I want to come back and add some more kind of shading or hatching. We'll use hatch lines and we'll brighten it up a little bit. Isn't— isn't invigorating to have a great idea? It is. It is invigorating. I think for me, creativity is invigorating. In case you don't know, I'm a little hyper sometimes on here. My poor pup Spark. I know my other peeps are in the other part of the house, so I'm not too concerned. All right, so here's what we're gonna do. Actually, Sharpie markers don't like to write on the wet areas too much, so we're gonna break out— I have a Sharpie gel pen, and we can do some sketching on here. I'm going to zoom in so you guys can see me hatching. So I kind of want to— well, you'll see. This is what hatching is. I'm gonna add shading but with lines, so I'm just gonna kind of go like this. Move my hand, I don't know if you can see that. So I just threw these lines in here, creates texture, it adds a little bit of shading. I could color that black, but I don't want it to be solid black. I want some of that purplish color to show through. I'm gonna keep some that sketchy, loose look I like. So hatching is a really cool way to do that.

Ta-da!

I just saw the McDonald's arch here, the Golden Arch. Now I want some french fries. Just saying. Yeah, I know, it always comes back to food. Throw some more verticals in here. I'm going to do a quick—

there we are.

So I thought sketching the bridge would be a good metaphor or just a good transition of going from 2023 to 2024. We're kind of bridging the gap between the years. Um, on that note, here's a sketch. Well, not this— I have this one, but I have another one I want to pull out.

I don't know where it is.

I had another Bruce sketch. So here's— this is kind of a bridge I did the other day, a perspective view. This is a fictitious bridge, but I just love sketching bridges because of their meanings, right? Literally, they take us, they connect us from one place to the other. There's a lot of songs and poems about bridges. I don't know if— I don't know how much more I want to add to this one. I kind of would do some vertical cables in here, although I like that white space.

I'm going to leave them off.

I do feel like I need a little bit more punch of yellow on here, so we got some yellow. When I do have my signature neon pink color pencil, throw some neon pink on there. If you look at this sketch here, you see I threw some pink here, here, and then down here. And I don't know, it's just a color I really like using. It adds a pop of— it pops it out a little bit, a little fun. Linda says, "I'd leave it." Yeah, I agree with you. I'm gonna leave this. I'm not gonna put any of the vertical tables here. I kind of like how this is really busy, so maybe this is our metaphor. Let's— oh, this is gonna be fun, guys. All right, hey, I see, um, S Club 11 joined. Hey, good to see you, hope all's well. Hey, Cameron's in the house, great to see you. Everybody's popping on. This is fun. Maybe I should do my own New Year's countdown. Um, anyway, here's, here's— we'll talk about the metaphor. So, right, I talked about this being a bridge. We're bridging from 2023 to 2024. And if you look at the right side, it's kind of really busy here with all these lines going on as we're going through the right to the left. So maybe this is 2023, we're traveling this way to 2024. It's getting simpler. I talked about one of, one of my keywords for next year, this coming year, '24, is to simplify things. So as we're traveling across the view from right to left, it's getting a little more So there we go. That's why we did what we did. All right, let's go grab, uh, some more of that lemon yellow. I could break out my neon yellow color pencil too, but let's go with some lemon first. So guys, let me know if any questions or comments or thoughts. What are you looking forward to in 2024? What are you doing tonight to celebrate? You guys, is everybody going to stay up and watch the ball drop? That's my goal. There we go. So you said just punch some yellow there, throw a little bit in here. I'm going to grab a little more purple, so I'll throw a little bit in here, and we'll pop a little more of that purple up in here. I don't know about you guys, but I'm feeling like this one's done.

Boom boom.

No, I'm watching the Twilight Zone shows on Syfy. Oh yeah, don't they usually have a marathon every year? What is your favorite Twilight Zone episode? The first one that always pops into my brain is the William Shatner one where he's on the airplane. That's a pretty— where he sees that creature on the wing of the airplane. Um, what a classic, classic show, right? That's fun. No, I was— uh, all right, tell me, guys, tell me to put down the paint. All right, I gotta put it down. Really cool. Um, Cameron says Happy New Year. Thank you, Cameron. Yeah, appreciate that, Cameron. I responded to your email. I hope you got it. Oh yeah, we did, we did get it. We talked about it, but I sent you a response with some, uh, feedback of maybe something you'd want to talk about when you come to visit as a guest speaker. My hand keeps picking up the paintbrush, so what I'm going to do, guys, is I'm going to put this aside and I'm going to just do another sketch because I want to keep sketching. So here we are, we're going to call this Bridging the Gap. Or should we call it— what would you guys call this? It's really showing— not a gap, it's really showing the transition. I don't know, getting too deep. That means we're going to put it aside. All right, um, let's grab a small sheet of paper. So we're going to use some Fabriano 1264 watercolor, 4 inches by 8 inches. It's 9:19. I'm going to wrap up by 9:30 so I can go have some popcorn with my family. We are popcorn addicts. We love it so much in this house. And in other news— yes, my brain's all over the place— in other news, uh, We went to see Wonka yesterday. I don't know if anybody has any interest in seeing the Wonka movie. I enjoyed it. It was a very fun show. It was a musical. Some catchy tunes in there. So, I feel like it kind of reminded me a little bit of The Greatest Showman. If you like the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory series and the Wonka character, I think you'll enjoy the movie. All right, what am I going to sketch? Hmm. We're just going to make up our own scene here, I think. We'll do a little perspective. Yeah, so we'll just do a little— just a quickie perspective. So yeah, this is just a fictitious, uh, sketch. It's kind of a place that's in my brain right now. We'll throw down some color on this as well. Maybe I'll try to use different colors than the last sketch we did. Let's see, kind of whatever my gut says is where we'll head with it. Bridging the transition, D-Ray says that. That sounds interesting. Bridging the transition. That's a great one too, but my favorite one It is time enough at last. Time enough at last. I must have missed something. Oh, Casa— I see you, Karen, said Casablanca. Yeah, that's a great movie. We actually— I was cleaning my shelf off the other day in the other room and I forgot I had like whatever 50th anniversary edition DVD or whatever year it was. That's a fantastic movie. And about 5 years ago, when the— whenever the anniversary was, They, um, in the movie theater, they showed it at the AMC theaters, so I got to see Casablanca on the big screen. It was an incredible movie. All right, cool. Alright, let's throw down some color on this. 9:24, I have 6 minutes, then I'm wrapping. I'm gonna do some really fast, just grab and go. We're gonna call this grab and go painting. I'm literally just dipping into the paint, not thinking too hard about what colors I'm doing. Kind of fun music. Sounds like some bagpipes going. We'll take it. Ah, let's break out some green. Why not?

All right, cool.

Um, music is fast. I know, I was trying to keep up with the music. Hey, GXRXVR joined us on Instagram. Hey, GXRXVR, good to see you. Um, hopefully I got them in the right order. I thought that's what you said. Hey, I used to dance to that music at the Highland Game Competitions. No way! How cool is that? That is so fun. Highlands Games Island Game Competitions. That sounds pretty cool. Uh-oh, 2 minutes and we're gonna wrap up. This is just a fun one, guys. I just want to stay on for a few more minutes with you. Um, I'll show you how the Brooklyn Bridge dried while I was working on this. That's so cool that you knew that song. Awesome. Now we're looking France. Going from, uh, Scotland to France. I told you this was called like the world playlist, taking us all over the world.

Cool.

This will be a fun one to come back and add some after it dries. It's going to dry really, really nicely, and then I'll come back in with the pen or the Sharpie probably marker and we'll add some details, and I'll post a picture of how it looks when it's done. But I think it's going to be really— it's a fun little sketch.

All right, 9:30.

All right, let me break out the Brooklyn Bridge, show you guys how it looks. Let me know in the chat if you have any last questions or comments. Um, Yeah, if you like the video and you're on YouTube, I would love for you to share it. I guess you could share on Facebook if you like this. If you want and you could share it, share it. Thumbs up and hearts and all that stuff is appreciated. My goal is to hit 600 subscribers by the end of this year on YouTube. Got really, really close. I think I ended up at I'd have to look, 563 or something, 564. So I'm really happy and proud that I made it that far. My goal, my goal by the mid, mid of next year is to make 1,000 YouTube subscribers. If you guys are on YouTube, feel free to check me out there at The Inspired Life. Like what you see, be awesome if you subscribe. All right guys, let's look at this one. I'm gonna bring over the bridge and we're gonna wrap. Not like rap, because you don't want to hear me rap. Um, yeah, no. Barbie pink. I love when Linda says, yeah, Barbie pink. I just saw that on the chat. Miss Nick, I'm heading out. Love your sketches. Hope you have a great rest of your New Year's Eve. Excellent. Thank you, Callie, for joining and tuning in. Really appreciate you. Take care. Um, thank you for your feedback. I love it. Happy New Year. All right guys, here's this one's drawing. Here's the bridge. I will tune out. Here you go. Um, love this piece. This is a real fun one to start the year— New Year with. Well, end the old year and kind of start the new year. My brain's in a It's all weird, like time machine going back and forth between years right now. I'm cool. I'll zoom in a little bit so you can see some of the detail. All right guys, there you go. Oh, this one over here as it dries. And let's go through the comments and we'll wrap up. Bridging the Transition, yeah, I like that. What a great movie. Uh, Cameron says good evening. Cameron, have a great evening. Happy New Year to you. D-Ray, Happy New Year to you as well. Guys, I want to thank everybody so, so much. It was fun having you tune in, whether it was Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Marmalade, all those other— I think I made that one up. I don't think Marmalade is a social network yet. Yet. Maybe one day we'll all subscribe to the Marmalade social network. Um, yeah, guys, you're awesome. I appreciate you all. Thank you so much for an amazing 2023. Um, you guys kept me motivated. Loved your feedback. Got my creativity going and I just love doing this for people watching and getting your feedback. And hopefully whether you learn something or you just enjoy a little bit of time out watching, I hope I'm contributing, contributing positively somehow. I guess I am because you keep watching. That's a good thing. End 2023 on a good note, everybody, and have an amazing, amazing, amazing and amazing. 2024, happy almost New Year. Appreciate you all. I'm not going anywhere. I'll keep doing this. Um, yeah, thank you guys. Peace, love, and creativity to all of you. Thank you so much. I mean it from here. Take care, guys.

Happy New Year.

I'm leaving. I'm finding the finish button. Do you I promise. Good night. Happy New Year, guys. Take care.