The INKspired Life - Loose Style Architectural Sketching

Hey everybody, hope you're having an awesome Thursday night, May 18th. Great to see you guys. I'm on for just a few minutes. I didn't do my Daily sketching. As you probably have noticed, my sketching time seems to be anywhere after like 9:00 PM, usually around 10:00. I think it's just become a habit lately and I feel like my brain says, "Alright, sketch," which is cool. So, I'm not gonna fight it. I'm gonna go with it. Yeah. Hope you guys can hear me okay. I think my music might be a little loud. It is, let me know. And let's start off taking a look at the sketch I finished today. I'll lower the music here, it's fucking loud. Here's a sketch I finished today that I started last night. So I'm still sketching the steel stacks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This was sketch number, hold on a sec, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 3, 4, 5, 6, and I did do another one on a separate sheet of paper that I sold. So, I guess this was number 7 here. This is great. I'm just gonna keep sketching this building. This facility, I love it. It's incredible and there's so much inspiration. See what I did there? Inkspiration for me to keep sketching. So this is what I ended up doing today. I added some hatching on here, black lines. You can see the hatching. I added my pink color that I've come to signature. Thank you guys for noticing that. So I have some pink here. Usually I'll do pink in like 3 places on these sketches, and then I have some neon yellow. Boom, boom. Some here as well. And I did use some light aqua colored pencil in a few places here, here, and down here. Oops, sorry, I'm off camera. Down here a little bit. So what I thought I'd do tonight, I'm going to actually start another SteelStacks sketch, but I've moved to a pretty big size sheet of paper. This is This is actually hot press paper and I wanted to play around with it a little bit. Hot press, I think it's 11 by 14. I believe it's Fabriano. I don't have the sketchbook here that came out of. So let's just mess around. I'm going to start with a Sharpie like I usually do, and we'll just— I have a picture on screen as a reference that I'll loosely use and we'll just kind of sketch the outline. So, we got Linda with a lot— Y, not a lie. Linda with a Y. Oh my gosh. The only bad thing about me sketching at 10 o'clock is that the only part of me that's really going right now is my creative brain. Speech brain is out the window. So, pardon me, this is unrehearsed, just beat myself up here. We have Linda with an I. Great to see you, Linda. As well. Um, both of them are on YouTube, is that true? That is so cool. Becky's in the house. Becky, great to see you. Linda with an I says, uh, maybe I'll just say LH and LS. LH says, I hear you just fine. Thank you so much. Becky says, great colors. You guys are awesome. Should I talk any radio voice for the rest of the night because I can do that. I could do the hair.

Cool.

All right, I'm talking a lot, guys. I'm sorry. Let me do some sketching. Hopefully I'll get it on the camera here. I think the bottom is off camera a little bit. Just kind of put my hand to see where the bottom—

bottom of the camera is about here. Okay.

All right, let's do some sketching. "My tube broke." So I gotta get a different Sharpie because I grabbed the one that's not working. That's okay, I have about 20 Sharpies here, always ready to go. Here we go. Of course the music stopped when I get started. All right, boom. Again, this is hot press paper, which I honestly have not used too much, but I thought it'd be fun just to, you know, step outside the comfort zone a little bit and play around with it. You know, for me, it's always just about kind of being playful and just having fun. I kind of like this Sharpie because it's almost dying, and I like to use Sharpies that sometimes don't have full ink in them. Kind of forces me to sketch a little harder in places. It's easier to look lighter.

This—

I am learning that I think I need a bigger work area. I don't know, where do you guys do your creative work or your painting or sketching or whatever you do for creativity? I'm curious. So I'm— I have a— I'm working on a small board here that's probably not even 20, it's probably 18 by 24 inches, but it's on top of a pretty big metal cabinet that has drawers, flat file drawers for like drawings. But I'm starting to think I'm going to have to kind of rework my space a little bit here. This is a really cool kind of big steel beam that's happening over in this area, kind of diagonal, diagonal pipes and rails happening here. Down here I have a big pipe, pipe thing.

That's cool.

Some kind of ladder, it looks like, coming down here. Maybe some kind of railing. This, it looks like a, some kind of tower piece. Oh, there's a ladder up in here. So one of these days I'll play the video. I shot a couple videos here. I just want to edit them a little bit, and then you guys can— then you can get a really good sense of the scale of this facility and how incredibly huge it is. I know it's hard to tell from these drawings exactly what scale it is. But I'll definitely play the video sometime when I get a chance to edit it. Just been so busy with school, functions at school, and it's all good. Not a complaint. I love the stuff I'm doing. It just takes up a lot of time and energy. It's fun. Good stuff. All right, so we've got a big kind of— thing happening in here. Drawing some contour lines just to help create the idea of a curved pipe happening here. Boom. And kind of a stack here. We got another stack, which I'm not gonna be able to fit on the sheet. There's a stack over in here. I'm just looking the top of it kind of jutting there a little bit. I hope you guys can see that okay. Move it up. One of the other things I've noticed whenever I use a Sharpie that is kind of drying out, my lines become even sketchier because I have to do this. I'll kind of zoom in here and I'll just show you on this piece of paper. So normally when I sketch, I do have wavy sketchy lines, which is fine, but when I'm losing ink, I feel like I got to really go over the lines a few times. And for me, that helps create kind of even a looser look that I like because I'm just going back over the lines, not exactly on top. I'm exaggerating here. But you might notice as I'm sketching on here, that's— kind of watch my pen, how it's touching the paper. It's kind of a connecting bridge thing here. It does this, comes down here at an angle. Alright, I think that's enough ink outline for now. Let's throw down some actual ink now. Enough Sharpie going on. I just wanted to sketch the cap of this. Kind of a cap piece on this. Cool. Let me look at the comments, see if you guys have any Qs or any— what's going on in comment land? Linda says, "Good to be here." Hello, Linda with a Y. You guys are funny. Hey, Laura's in the house. Laura, great to see you. Hope you're having a great, great day today. Laura's always posting some great art, as well as Linda with a Y. I always love seeing your art, you guys, and Becky always has some cool images. Good stuff. Linda says, I do my art in the front room that has 5 windows, of which 3 of them are the bay windows. You know, there's just something really amazing, inviting, and cozy about bay windows. As an architect, I've designed a few bay windows in some projects over the years. I especially like the bay windows that have wind built in. Really cool nooks for just chilling, reading books. I've done bay windows with, you know, seating, but the seating cushions could be taken off. You have storage underneath. That's really cool. And windows are great for natural lighting, right? You can't beat having natural light when you're doing artwork. Very, very cool. Becky says, I've been working on what should be the dining table. Love it, love it. You know what's so cool about working on the dining table? One thing that comes to mind is like, for me, the space is just so, so big. Throw everything out, plenty of room. That's definitely an advantage. Oh, I do want to sketch this couple pieces here. I think would be cool to tie this together. That's awesome.

All right, cool.

That's good. All right, let's throw down some ink now. Hey, Linda says seeing it fine. Thank you guys. I appreciate you letting me know about the sound, if you can hear me and how the image is looking. Look cool. I think I've been shaking this ink for about 5 minutes. Good thing it's not— this ink was carbonated and I went to open it, it would be a huge, huge mess. Oops, gotta open my water. So I'm still using the same— I think I'm on this water for at least a week. I'm using the same dirty water. I'll probably use it until until I see stuff growing in it. All right, here's where the fun is. I'm— we'll see how this ink is gonna just probably run off this hot press paper. This is so slick and smooth. So it'll be cool to try it out and see what happens. You'll see I'm just letting gravity kind of be my friend right now, just dabbing the brush in spots and just letting the— my board is at an angle. I like to work at a slight angle so it's not totally flat because, um, I just like the effect of gravity letting this run down the page and kind of puddling here. I'll let it dry like that too. Let me pull this down a little bit here. Just kind of tapping it. There we go. Let's pull this down a little bit here too. Cool. All right, I think that's enough of that for now. I don't want to throw down too much of that color. Laura says, when I moved into this townhome, I took the second bedroom and it turned in— I turned it into the studio. Humble though. That is what I always wanted. It has morphed from interest to interest. Yeah. So, you know, sometimes it's good to have a space, you know, that's flexible that you can keep changing on the fly, especially if you have a lot of interests, like you wrote down sewing and quilting, hand spinning, weaving, journaling, sketching, and painting. So, it's cool to have a flexible space where you can do all that stuff. Awesome. I love that. I'd love to write a book one day or not even a book, just something about like creating the ultimate studio space or creative workstation. I'm not sure yet. I've always had an idea in my head that it would be cool just to put my architectural twist and my artist brains together and just come up with some kind of book, maybe like, I don't know, a top 10 design inspiration or ideas for designing your ultimate creative space. I think that'd be really cool. If any publishers are listening, Let me know. Let's talk. Let's talk. Awesome. All right, let's throw down. So we got some of our Apple Snail ink. Next, we're going to add— I kind of have a process for these sketches I've been doing. Next, I'll typically throw down the turquoise watercolor paint. I guess there's no rhyme or reason to the order I'm doing this in. It's just the way these things have been developing. So I'm just going to dip into my watercolor palette, lift out some of this turquoise on here. Hey, Heather's in the house! Heather, great to see you. Laura, this is in the stacks. Yeah, Laura, this is part of the steel Stacks series. This is number 8, I believe. Number 8 in the series. I am having a blast. No pun intended because there are blast furnaces here. This is— was a steel manufacturing facility. But I am literally having a blast sketching this series. Kind of got off track a little bit from my New York City and bridge sketches, which is okay. I don't mind it. I'm just kind of just going where my creative— where my creative heart is taking me, and it's just taking me to these steel stacks for now. I would love to be able to, uh, hook up with SteelStacks and see if they'd be interested in selling these as maybe postcards or something. So, I have a friend whose sister works, I don't know if she works for the SteelStacks or the facility across the street. That might be a cool connection there. How fun would it be to have like some of your artwork in a gift shop? Cool. Love this. So, I love what's happening here. I'm gonna zoom in. Let me put my thing down here. Look, you can zoom in right— check this area out right here. I love how the turquoise and the brown are coming together. Turquoise is kind of pushing the brown away and I like what's happening right in there. It's pretty cool. I also love this. Pens up over here. I love the hard edges happening. I'm a huge fan of hard edges in ink watercolor washes. I really love this. Let me zoom back out. Sorry, I forgot to zoom out. There you go. I think that's enough turquoise for now on here. The next color I usually like to add is orange.

So let's put out some orange.

So cool you can go to a tea room with your friend and sketch. That is awesome, right? That's so cool. Kind of like, yeah, this is really awesome. Actually, I want to splatter some turquoise on here. I forgot to do it. Now I want to go to like a Starbucks and sketch.

Cool.

All right, let's throw down some orange. Becky says, "I would love a combination studio and sunroom." That sounds like a beautiful space. I can picture that in my brain. You have any pups or kitties around, they love to lounge in the sun. Sunrooms are really cool. I, back when I worked for another architect years and years ago, I, um, we worked with a fellow that designed conservatories, these really fancy schmancy glass rooms, glass sunrooms. There are some really cool designs. These were pretty expensive. I mean, these sunrooms were, you know, talking $100,000, $200,000. I was fortunate enough to work work in an area out of college that had some money. So we had— I got to work on some really, really cool houses. That was a nice experience. It was actually very eye-opening to see how different levels of income, how they kind of view their houses and the design process and the architect. Me, I'm just mod— I'm a modest person, very modest. All right, cool. So throwing out some orange on here, you can kind of— you see it coming together a little bit the more colors I add. So right here's a, you know, if you go back to look here in this book, same color palette's happening. So I'm really interested to see how this is going to dry.

Boom!

Laura said, "That would be cool." Then he's like, "Don't forget the hot pink focal point." Ninda! Guess what's right here? Boom! You got it! So check out this. This is my jar of the day. I just put a jar— usually I have all these kind of laying here flat— stuck them in this jar. If anybody's into baking out there, I love making homemade pizza. This is not a plug for King Arthur. But I love their pizza seasoning, so I use that all the time when I make pizza. King Arthur makes great products, but they're not, they're not cheap, so I don't buy there too often, from them too often. But yeah, really good pizza seasoning. Dang, now I want pizza. All right, Linda, since you remind me, here we go. Let's throw on some hop. I used to always do it at the end of the process, but let's live on the edge and throw them on right now. I def— I feel like I want some, want some in this upper corner. If someone bought this and they framed it, this would be really cool to just maybe mat, um, just have a glass panel in front. Because this, you know, is actually really cool. It's going out to edges, so if you matted this, it would be cropping it off. So we got some there. Let's go. I'm just gonna leave it at those 3 places for now. So I was kind of doing what I did do a lot, is I just let my hand kind of wander. And it helps me just pick out the spots I want to put the colors. So today it was just telling me to kind of do this pattern here. Although I do feel like I want to pop— you know what, I'm going to live on the edge. I'm going to go 4. Usually I only do 3 places. I feel like I want to pop up here as well. I think I am out of Preppy Yellow. I am, I am burning through Preppy Yellow like no tomorrow because I have to shake it like this to get it out. So you can see I just kind of blew it around. I just want to create more movement in here, so I just glue that paint down a little bit. I'm going to skip that happy there. I'm going to have to put some more ink in there later, cartridge. So I'm going to throw down some yellow.

Next.

Um, King Arthur flour is the best. Yeah, Linda, they do really have great flour. That's the flour I use for my pizza dough. Becky says, I live very close to King Arthur headquarters in North Nowhere to Run. Oh, that's so cool. That's awesome, Becky. Very, very cool. And I really do like, like their products. Oh, that was cool. I liked what just happened there. Kind of did the bridge effect, right, where we Run on some color, it touches the other color, it makes a bridge, and they just kind of join together. That was fun.

Hmm.

Not really sure where I wanna throw down some yellow. I'm not gonna force it. My brain's— My brain's kind of saying I don't need more yellow on here, so I'm going to leave it at that for now. I think that's good for now. Let's just get some hatch lines on here and then we'll wrap up for tonight. It's 10:30. 3:33. Holy moly, holy moly, where'd the time go? Hope you guys are having a great time. Hope, uh, you're having fun. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I always appreciate you guys participating and just even being out there. If you're watching the background, kind of lurking a little bit, um, Actually, you know what I want to do next? Instead of doing hatch lines, I'm going to pick out my Lamy pen. I want to throw down some dark black, just outline some things, and that'll be the last thing for tonight. As you can probably hear in my voice, I am tired. Tired and mired.

All right.

Lamy pen, black Lamy ink. Why? Because I want to pull out some outlines. You can see it really good on this one. I just want to darken some edges, pull some of these shapes out a little bit. Lamy pen, I love using it. It's nice and dark and it bleeds if I want it to bleed. Another thing I could use if I was really brave is I have a bold— well, I could use this Sharpie. I was really brave. I break out my Sharpie King Size. Look at that, King Size. I could use that. Oh, you know what? All right, I'm feeling brave. I'm going to use the Sharpie King Size. You only live once. Why not? If you ever use a Sharpie King Size, here's a pro tip. Make sure you have ventilation in the room because this thing stinks. It smells big time. Poof! I don't even have any warnings on here or not, but it does smell. All right, it's a chisel point, which is interesting. You can see the point there. Man, I haven't used this in a long time. Alright, let's just do it and see what happens.

I'm going to make some room.

I'm actually going to go back a couple of songs to— let's see, which song do I want? Not that one. Yeah, I like this song. This is the song I've been using for my timelapse videos on YouTube. Alright, so you can see the Sharpie. I'm actually just using the pointier side. I'm not using the chisel part— I mean the, uh, broad part. And I'm not going to get too crazy. I don't want to darken every single line on here. I'm just trying to pull out some outside edges, and I do want to pull out I'm actually going to switch to the Lamy because I think I want to bleed some of this, but I want to pull this stack out a little bit here. All right, there we go. I used the thicker Sharpie. Live on the edge tonight, guys. No extra charge for that demonstration. Of courage. Here we go. I love that piece of music. It's just so cool. It's so superhero-ish. All right guys, I think I'm going to leave this at this stage for tonight. My brush just fell under here. Um, let me grab the brush and we'll wrap up. Let me know if you have any last questions or comments for tonight. This will dry, so definitely not done. I need to come back. Um, it's bigger than the ones I've been doing. You can see the size comparison here. So I might end up adding a little bit more color in here. Definitely need to add some more line work with my Sharpie or Pilot pen. Yeah, there we go. That's the start of SteelStacks numero ocho. Hey, Lynn says, just enjoying your painting come to life. That's cool. Love it. Love it. Thank you. Um, anyone else's comments acting weird? I'm not seeing anyone else's comments. Really? Uh-oh, Laura's not seeing anyone else's comments. Let's see, Laura, I'm trying to figure out why you're not seeing comments. Um, Becky's eyes are fading fast. Me too, Beck. I'm out of here. I'm out here in a minute. Thank you, Jason Nicholas Nicholas, and everyone, enjoy your weekend. Thank you, Linda. Yes, enjoy your weekend as well. Becky, thank you for being on. You're awesome. Laura, you're awesome. Everybody in here is awesome. I don't need to say that. We all know that. Laura, I'll try to figure out what's going on with the comments. I have to look into that one. So I'm using this, I'm actually streaming on YouTube and Facebook at the same time. I don't know if that has something to do with it. Becky's on Facebook, looks like Laura you're on Facebook as well. Linda's more on YouTube. Oh, thank you for letting me know, I'll check that out. Thank you guys, everybody that was watching here, I appreciate you all so much. Enjoy the rest of your evening, tomorrow's Friday. I will probably not be on tomorrow night. I have a function I have to go to. Saturday night I get to volunteer for our junior prom. That's going to be so much fun. Seriously, it's going to be awesome. I can't wait. So, I probably will not be on Saturday either. Sunday possibly because we're off. Our school's off on Monday. They gave us a snow day back and they're letting us have this Monday off. So, that's cool. And then we're off next Monday too for Memorial Day. All right guys, thank you so much. I appreciate you all. Heather was in the house, both Lindas, Becky was here, Laura was here. And if I missed your name, I am so sorry. Have a great, great night. Keep paying it forward with positivity and creativity And yeah guys, that's it. Peace and live creatively. I'll see you soon. Take care. Thank you for your likes and your subscribes. Appreciate you all. Good night. The button's here. See, I keep covering up the finish button. All right, I still got to work on a better exit strategy. If anybody has any ideas, let me know in the comments. What would be a better way to end my stream? Besides me talking for an hour before I end it and trying to find the finish button. Do I need a theme song? Do I need like an intro song, an outro song, credits? Let me know. Thanks guys, take care. Oh, I just hit the camera. Good night.