The INKspired Life

Hey there, happy Thursday, April 18th, 8:38 PM. Hope you're doing well. Chip says, love that sketch already. Hey Chip, thanks for joining me. I see you over there on Facebook. Hope you're doing well. Chip is putting out some amazing art pieces. Um, so be sure to check Chip's artwork out. So, so cool. Um, thanks Chip, I'm glad you like this. I'm gonna start the show, talk about this sketch, and have a short video I want to share as well. So, um, yeah, let's get things rocking and rolling. I am actually— I'm tidying up my desk. Probably should have done that before I came online, but, uh Sometimes I need to start with a fresh desk. I have things everywhere around here, so that's my thing. I hope you guys are doing well. Just closing some windows on screen here. Boom. Do a little, uh, just a quick little tour. Of some sketches in here.

Alright guys, hope you're doing well.

Again, happy Thursday. I'm popping on real quick. I want to show you a couple sketches and maybe we'll do a quick sketch together. Uh, I want to give you a quick tour of some of the sketches I did While I was in NYC a couple weekends ago, it was freezing out. I think it was like 40 with the wind chill. So my sketches were really, really quick, but it didn't stop me. So this is a sketch here that was inspired by the Copper Building, which is iconic, an iconic building, an H-shaped building with a skybridge. Really quick sketch, maybe, maybe 2 minutes. This was another sketch of the same building. This was a longer sketch, maybe 5 minutes to 6, 5 to 7 maybe. And I traveled light that day. I traveled into New York City with a really small backpack and my Lachby field journal, Sharpie of course. And then I carried these in my backpack, which I really— I didn't even use any of this stuff. It was so cold out, I just stuck with the Sharpie. And then this was, uh, here's a sketch that was done while on the ferry ride from the East 34th Street ferry down to Dumbo, a Brooklyn area. Really cold again. I was out on the top of the ferry, windy, and I just wanted the experience and the thrill and the fun of capturing a sketch while the ferry was moving. Um, we dodged a few raindrops, it looks like. I don't see any wrinkles on here, so that was good. Pretty cool. Here's another sketch. This was a quick sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I did a couple that day. My main focus that day was to get out there and sketch the bridge, and I wanted to get some video footage I could put on my YouTube and on my website. I actually am going to show you the video I just finished editing. It's, it's a first version, the first cut, so you guys will get to see the first cut. And this is, this is the Brooklyn Bridge sketch I did in the video we're watching. This is the one I was doing You'll see in the video I was standing up sketching. My friend Sifat from the New York— I'm sorry, the NYC Walking Show YouTube channel, he actually was really kind and he filmed the video of me while I was sketching. So, shout out to Sifat of the NYC Walking Show. He's really awesome. Um, so yeah, you'll see me sketching this in the video, uh, on that cold day. All right, cool. So yeah, let's show you guys the video. Let me know what you think in the comments. Again, it's cut number 1. I'll be editing it more, and I do eventually want to add some kind of a voiceover and maybe take the music out. This is so much fun. Boom boom. I just have to find the video. Let me click here, and I think it's this one. Alright, cool. So that's the video. Um, I like it. That's the second time I watched it. Um, I like it. I think it's, it's pretty cool. In the video, I love that you can actually see me sketching, uh, the wind blowing, uh, people walking, the ferry in the background. It was actually a very quiet day at the Brooklyn Bridge area, and this was in Dumbo. Usually on a beautiful day, that place area is really crowded, so you would have seen a lot more people. But that's— I love sketching outside because you never know what the environment is going to bring, especially in New York City. There's always something going on, right? Really, really cool. So I thought tonight we'll, um, we'll do a sketch. I'm not sure what we'll sketch yet. This was another sketch I did. This was the radiator building. Um, what else we got going? These are some— oh, some outdoor sketches I did the other day. All right, cool. All right, let's do some sketching. If you're just joining me, hey, welcome! Hope you guys are doing well tonight. Happy Thursday. This, uh, this is a sketch I started a couple days ago and then I finished it last night. I think I was like on live. And this was, um, this is inspired by New York City. We have the Chrysler Building back here, this— we have a bridge coming over to Grand Central, and then we have the MetLife Building in the background. I really like the way this came out. I love the colors on here. So I'll just zoom in, you can kind of see it. So this is mixed media. It has graphite, watercolor, ink, and colored pencil on it. So there's a bunch of stuff happening on this one, and it's really— it's a fairly big size. It's on a sheet of 18 by 12, so 12 inches by 18-inch paper, watercolor paper. Awesome. All right, let's do a quick sketch. 8:46. I'm going to wrap up at 9 tonight. What should we do? Chip's in the house. I know Chip loves his doors. So if you're still watching, Chip, maybe we'll sketch another door tonight. So let me grab some paper. And I'm very, very happy because— let me show you. I'll show you why I'm happy. Um, you guys know I love sketching with this Fabriano sketchbook. It's watercolor paper. I had the hardest time finding this. It was sold out on Amazon. I tried some other sites, sold out. Finally found it and ordered like 5, 5 pads. So let's, uh, let's just break open this one today. I haven't used it yet, as you can see, brand new. Um, so this is Fabriano 1264 watercolor paper. Made in Italy, just like me. Half— I'm half Italian, the good half. No, I am half Italian. I don't— that's— that was a joke. Um, hey Kathy Marie King Stewart, great to see you on YouTube. Thank you for sharing your great artwork. Thank you for saying that, that really makes me happy. And, um, I love that, I love that you are enjoying it. So thank you so much for the shout out. Chip says, I really love how you pick and choose what you include in sketch. Is there a formula in your head on what to include and what to leave out in all your work? Uh, great question. Let's, let's talk about this one right here. So this is actually pretty busy. I did leave out, uh, let me see if I could find the actual photo. I don't know if I could do that right away. It might still be here. Let me see. It might be— click on some buttons. Nope, that's Chip's door we did last time. Here we go. So here's— I'll blow it up. Here's kind of— this is the photograph that inspired my sketch. I took this photograph when I was in the city that same day of the video I just showed you. Um, take a look at the photo. I'll see if I can shrink it and move it a little bit out of the way, cover my face up. There we go. So if you look, you can see loosely inspired, right? I'm never trying to replicate the photograph. I don't— that's not my style. I'm not a realist sketcher or a realist painter. I just go with my gut. Chip always loves my answers because it takes me forever to actually answer. I think I do this in school too, so if any of my students are watching You feel free, you can give me a thumbs up if that's true. They ask me a question, I usually end up, end up talking, answering a different question than the one that was asked. It's kind of how my brain works. Hey Jason Horvath, great to see you! I got your message, Jason Horvath. Um, yeah, there's a— I have a Facebook group, it's called The Inkspired Life Inklings, so you might be part of The Inklings group. I'll have to check for you. It's good to see you. Back to Chip's original question. He's probably sleeping by now. All right, so here's what I left out. There's a building here I totally left out. Bunch of buildings back in here I left out. A lot of stuff happening under the bridge I totally left out. So I'm glad I left this out because it did— that would've made this even busier. And here's why my brain— I think my brain deleted stuff from this sketch. Um, I, I know that I wanted the Chrysler Building to stand out by itself. It's iconic. So I tried to leave nothing around it. So that's one of the reasons I edited, edited that out, because I wanted this iconic building to kind of pop and stand out in the background. Um, I took the stuff out under the bridge here because I really wanted the arch of the bridge to show. I like the line work. I love how this flows, and I feel like if I added stuff under the bridge, it would have been confusing and confusing and taken away from the arch. So I cut that out as well. Um, yeah, I think that's, that's it. So I really edited all this because I wanted the Chrysler Building to pop, and I wanted just the MetLife. I like this geometry, this relationship here, I should say, the angle of these two buildings coming up. Boom. So I think if leaving this stuff out here just helps to reinforce those lines. So that's it. That's probably one of the reasons I like to edit, cut things out. Gut feeling, making iconic things pop. And to make it— this is busy enough with what I did here. It's kind of crazy, maybe a little too much happening, but I can edit it out. You could always come back and add stuff in later if you want. So don't be afraid to leave too much out at the beginning. Hope that makes sense. Um, doors are great, timeless stories they tell without saying an audible word. Yeah, so Chip, I'm gonna dig into my photos as we're talking and see if I could pull up a door picture. We'll do— we'll sketch a door tonight. It's very true. Jason Nicholas Nicholas says, wow, you said my name right. I am on it, on this account. Uh, cool. Well, that's awesome. I'm glad you're part of the Inklings. And Chip says, love the angles and what it says in its own artful way. Hey, Okay, thank you, Chef. Yes, this is a fun piece. All right, I have a question. Do you guys like music or no music? I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop music on Facebook. There's a song somewhere in my playlist Facebook is not liking, and it's stopping my stream the past 2 times. I don't know what song it is, so I'm going to play. I don't know which playlist to play here because I don't want to be cut off. I have music here I pay to use, and for some reason Facebook thinks one of the songs is not— I haven't paid for. I don't understand. Anyway, that's my issue. Um, which we put on— I'm gonna put this playlist on here. All right, let's break out the 1264 Fabriano. Yeah, I'm weird, I always leave the first page with nothing on it. Don't know why. Looking in my photos for a door. I heard jazz. I think— did I just see the word jazz? I covered up my comments looking for photos. Hey, all right, Chip, you know what? I have a playlist called Jazz I made. These are all songs I paid for. Here. Let's see what's in the jazz playlist. All right, doors. Let's see, I'm going to do a search. You can see my keyboard here. I'm actually going to search for doors in my photos and see what the magic of technology pulls up. Doors, it says 2,479 photos. Gotta love tech. Let's see. Oh yeah. Um, I have a bunch of doors. I— where is this building? I'm just looking through. Chip and I saw a lot of doors in Princeton. Which we do. All right, here are the Princeton Doors. I'm looking for the Jim Morrison Doors. That was a joke. Get it? Haha.

Uh-huh.

I don't know, let's go for— where is this door a picture from? Maine. All right, I got a door from Maine. We're gonna pull this door on here. All right, so this is a door, uh, this is a photo I took in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. So let's sketch this door. So I have 5 minutes to do a sketch. Wish me luck. Alright, I'm gonna use my Sharpie in case I want to come back, add color later, or watercolor or ink. I add water and that way my Sharpie ink won't bleed. So let's do that. I have a big picture here. Let's sketch it. Sharpie doesn't want to start. I think I picked the— I picked the dead Sharpie. All right, when— that's okay, I probably have another at least 20 here.

All right, let's try this one.

I like to loosen up my hand so it's kind of just moving around, dancing a little bit. Yeah, the Sharpie has ink in it. That's the actual door panel I sketched. Now I'm going to kind of sketch the perspective of the frame around it. I'm going to just draw these angles, kind of connect them. I'm not sketching every detail. I'm actually going to draw an angle down here, an angle here. We're just going to kind of connect those dots, those ends. If I put a dot here, a dot here, just think of this as connecting the dots.

Boom.

And then we have, uh, this frame kind of comes out where there's a step that comes out a little bit here, right? This definitely isn't to scale because this frame should really be back here somewhere. Step really would end here. We're going to own— we're just going to own it. You know what? Lines are crooked, they're wonky. We're going to own our mistakes and keep moving forward because it's not really a mistake. We're playing. One of the things I don't like about this is I forget to flip it like this when I'm using it. I'm left-handed, so more freedom. When I do this, the, uh, the ring binding impedes my sketching. I love ring binders, ring binders because you can flip the pages over, get flat, have everything lay flat. What the rings do kind of annoy me a little bit. All right, boom, got some kind of wood framing here, got a door. This door has its rectangles and squares, right? You got some kind of rectangle. I'm not measuring scale and proportion Very loose, very wonky. I'm just trying to capture the idea of the shapes that are here. We've got some kind of panel thing happening here with a— looks like a mouse slot in here. Another panel. Then we got space and these two smaller panels here. It's a pretty cool door, actually. So yeah, I'm not gonna have enough room to draw all the panels. I didn't leave enough on the bottom, so I could have— I could have pulled this down a little bit more here for our lines like this. So don't be afraid to go over your lines and make corrections. For me, that's part of the fun of, um, sketching is I like to see the line work. I like to stick to my thinking process. You know, we got a door back in here in the background. Let's sketch kind of something, kind of eyeing up the top of the door. Maybe it's here somewhere. Just kind of sketch this in for fun. You can see the bead or vinyl beaded ceiling kind of here. There's a ramp there. This has a— this comes down like this. So we got a quick wonky door happening. We got some shadows. I'm gonna just imagine we got shadows in here, right? So, I'm just gonna do some scribbling, some hatch lines here. It's 9 o'clock, so I'm gonna wrap this. Let's just add our shadows, continue it down this edge. For me, this is when it starts coming together, is when you start adding these hatch lines for shadows. I can start to pull out some of these shapes a little more. Uh, for example, there's kind of a recessed panel, so add some quick hatch lines there. I'm essentially scribbling. I'll zoom in. I'll do it here. I'm essentially just scribbling. Hopefully you can see that. My hand might be blocking it, sorry. I'll scribble down this side so you can see it. All right, I'm gonna— I usually go top to bottom. Let's see if that works. You guys, if the camera picks it up. Got some scribbling again. We'll just kind of do some here just to create maybe some recess, recesses on these panels. I'll go back over the lines to pull the rectangles out more, keeping it loose and fun and wonky. This door's got some tune. Got a lock up here. I see your A square with a circle and deadbolt happening. Got a knob over here, the plate behind it. This looks like a— I don't know, this almost looks like a doorbell or buzzer button here. I'm not sure what that is. Maybe there's like some kind of number up in here. It looks like I can't read it. 277. Looks like there's some kind of numbers up here. Let's make it say 277, maybe.

I don't know.

Um, yeah, there you go. We're going across here. We got edge here. This looks like a wood step. Maybe there's some wood grain or something happening here. Step comes like that. Let's put some shading under here, some hatch lines, so it looks like this stair treads overhanging a little bit. One of the ways that architects like to show glass, one of the ways I like to show it as an architect, is I'm just gonna use lines. I'll just do some lines like this to show, indicate kind of a glass area. I think this would be really cool if I add some graphite and, um, let's add some graphite and just give some gray to it. Hey, D-Ray says, I'm watching that door come together, handsome one at that. Oh, thank you. Hey, Laura, great to see you. Laura had a really nice post. Uh, always love your grungified heart. Painting. So, Laura, great to see you. Sorry, I am, I am super thirsty. I'm just gonna use a graphite stick. Love this water-soluble art graph stick, so much fun. And you'll see what we'll do with it. We'll just throw some down here. I'm gonna just throw some down and we'll take some water and put it on top and bring it to life a little bit more. Where is my brush? Huh, I don't know where my brush is that I usually use. All right, I have, I have other brushes here, so you know what, I haven't used this. I used to use 3/4-inch brushes. All the time, flat brushes. Let's pull it out. I haven't used it in a long time. I'm just going to throw some on the door. I'm going to throw somewhere— some water on top of where I put it before. And then here's the real fun part. I should take this off of here in case, uh, I think I'm actually going to be mailing this one out to a friend. All right, here comes the fun part. I'm just gonna take my ArtGraph stick, dipping it in water, or just— it's wet here already— and we're just going to sketch with it. And I love the lines. From doing this. Again, we're keeping it really loose and sketchy. For me, this is just going to add some character to the sketch. I wanted to prop this at an angle, so let's just throw, uh, I have this thing, we'll just throw under here, prop it up. Yeah, I have not used this brush in a long time. And this is, this is kind of really in the background. I'm gonna just throw this. Hopefully I'm still live. Facebook, this Facebook cut me off tonight. I don't know what song Facebook— Facebook does not like on my playlist, but when I get to it, it says, okay, we're turning you off. I paid for all these songs to use them, right? All right, cool. So I just threw that kind of dark area back there, and I'm just gonna scribble. I like I like art graph. I'll do a close-up. I just love the way the graphite melts on the water. It's so fun, right? You can see I'm getting really wavy and sketchy with it here, but it's just so cool. Let me know if you guys have any questions or thoughts before I, uh, head off here in a minute. So this is just a quick, loose, wonky door sketch. Should I throw some color on it? Yeah, you know what, I'm gonna throw color. I'm gonna throw on there. Hmm, I'm thinking too much. So when I— my brain starts thinking too much It kind of shuts me down a little bit. Turquoise. Let's go with turquoise. Keep using the same brush. I really have no idea where my bamboo brush went. Somewhere here. And I'm just going to throw— I want to throw some color just on where the door is, just to bring it out a little bit. So I just want to pop a little. So now you can see why I started with the Sharpie, because otherwise all these black lines here would be bleeding and it'd be one big mess. So I start with a Sharpie. I'm not worried about making mistakes. Um, for me, mistakes just add to the wonkiness. So it's just kind of a viewpoint. I'm not sketching perfection. I'm sketching— what would be a good saying? I'm not sketching perfection. I'm sketching blank imperfection. I'm sketching emotion. Sketching the moment. That's cool. Hey, you know what I want to throw in? I just got an idea. I want to throw in some yellow. Maybe there's— it's getting dark out and there's some lights going on in the building. Let's grab some of this yellow here.

Oh, we got some yellow happening.

Cool. Um, let me look at some comments and then we'll wrap up. Oh, nice to catch you live. Thank you. Yeah, it's good to be live. It's good to be alive. Um, Laura said I use my ArtGraph stick a lot the last few days. Oh, awesome. Yeah, aren't these just so much fun? I think my favorite way to use them is just to literally dip them in water and sketch paint with them. I call it sketch painting because you're like kind of sketching and painting. Um, your S is popping up, adding graphite. Thank you. Yeah, your A looks turquoise. Good. You don't use the art graph as bold as I— you do, but I learned a trick from you and I scribble it on my glass work surface and then my small wet brush to pick up what I need for the area. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. I love doing this. I'm glad you picked— that's so cool that you picked up on this. Yeah, I'll do this. I'll throw it down on my board. I do the same thing with my watercolor markers. I'll throw it on the board and then I'll take my brush, a wet brush. I'll kind of pick it up here off the board throw it down, right? So you can see what's happening there. That's so cool. I'm so glad that you do that. You picked up that tip. Awesome. Yeah, very, very cool. It does dry lighter, so sometimes I'll come back and just add more. Awesome. Hey Mickey, great to see you. Better late than never. Hey, you know what? Can't be late if I don't tell you guys when I'm going to be on. And I'm actually on a Thursday, so that's a surprise, right? Yeah, usually on— I've been on Wednesdays and Fridays, so just wanted to pop on a little bit here and say hello. Um, like the door, the color is perfect. Oh good. Yes, it's a real quick color. I'm not trying to weather it. One of the photographs, really beautiful and weathered. Maybe I'm thinking this summer I might slow down a little bit with some sketching and take the time to show some more, some more detail. So I love speed sketching, quick, fast, loose, furious, reckless. But I might slow down this summer for some sketches and to see what happens and see what I can draw and sketch. So, I'm just having fun playing with the graph. It's kind of pulling some lines down, grunge-ifying it. I love the grungy look happening. I feel like the stair— step here could use some more, maybe a little bit more here. You could actually take your art graph and I'm just blotting it See what happens. Like, if I just blot it down, you'll get these areas. So it's kind of a cool way to add a little bit of texture. One of the things I do love about the ArtGraph sticks is it picks up on the texture of the paper. You can see that happening here, kind of these bumpy lines. I was Briefly talking to Chip earlier today and mentioning, um, Chip's been doing a lot of really cool acrylic paintings. And one thing I've loved about painting with acrylics— when I used to do it a lot, I love the textures you get. But you could also get textures when you're doing these mixed media sketches, right? Just using the paper. So pretty cool.

Awesome.

Don't exclude Princeton in the summer. Yeah, Chip, we, we are going to Princeton. We're going to Princeton. I'm even contemplating considering getting a hotel somewhere and staying overnight and just going to 2 days in a row to Princeton. Soaking it all in, doing tons of sketching. So yeah, we'll definitely have to find a time to meet in Princeton this summer. I know I said I'm going to wrap up about 15 minutes ago, didn't I? I always do that.

What am I doing?

Boy, I'm missing my other brush. So 3/4 inch— I used to use these all the time for acrylic painting, the 3/4 inch flat brushes. This was my standard acrylic. You can even see some acrylic paint there. This was my standard size brush for acrylics.

All right.

Very, very cool. Hey guys, let me know if you have any final questions. We're in the home stretch. Like that graphite picks up on the texture too. Oh yeah, good. D-Ray, I'll go close so you guys can see that again. You can really see it happening down here. I missed the wrap-up anyways. Keep going. I get so excited, it's really hard to stop. All right, guys. So thank you very much. Let's go back. If you missed the beginning, I showed a video, some video footage of me doing some urban sketching in Brooklyn. At the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a real short video. Be sure to go back, check it out on the replay. I'm thinking of— it's version 1. I might— I'll be tweaking it and stuff, but I wanted to put it out there today. I think of using it as maybe the start for my sketching sessions online. So let me know if you like the video. You think it'd be cool if I use that video to start the shows with? Let me know. Um, you guys are awesome. I mean, actually play that. I'm going to play the video now on the way out. Thank you guys so much for watching. I appreciate you all. Enjoy the rest of your Thursday. I will be on tomorrow night, Friday, and then Saturday night is my online workshop that some of you guys out there have signed up for. So thank you so much. We will be sketching New York City-inspired architecture, so the Brooklyn Bridge might make an appearance, the Empire State Building. Maybe a water tower, um, maybe a skyline sketch. So in 2 hours, we're going to be covering a lot of fun sketches and some different techniques and give you guys a little peek inside my scary sketching brain. It's not really scary, it's fun. All right guys, let's play the video on the outro. Thank you guys. Feel free to comment on YouTube, Facebook, Insta. Uh, Betty Crocker cookbook, wherever you're watching this. I don't know where that— I must be hungry. Okay guys, I appreciate you all so, so much. You're amazing. I'm gonna play that video on the outro. Here we go. Keep paying it forward with positivity. I like to use my creativity for positivity. Yeah, let's spread goodness out there. Peace and live creatively. Here comes the video. See you guys on the flip. I'm gonna stop this music first. Hey, I did it! 1, 2, 3, video time! Oh, looks like 2 minutes, maybe 2 minutes long.