The Inkspired Life - Sketching & Painting : Inking Out Loud

Hey everybody, how are you? Awesome. Good morning, Jason Nicholas. Hope you're doing good. I have not sketched live in a while, and I'm here just for a few minutes tonight sketching a bridge that I saw in Central Park when I was there a couple weeks ago. I hope you guys are doing well, and it's fun to be here sketching. I've just been I'm kind of tired at night, really tired, and not an excuse to not be on sketching, but I've been tired, went to bed kind of early. It's great to be here and just do a kind of a quick loose sketch of this bridge. Let's see, I'm checking in the comments, hopefully everybody's doing well. Cool.

Let's see.

Loud music. Hey, let me know if you can hear me now. I didn't know the music was so loud. Hi, Aaron said, how are you? Yeah, let me know how the music is. That's so weird. I updated my streaming software, that could definitely be part of the reason. Hmm, trying to figure out why the music is so loud. Yeah, I can hear you now. I do like it, just doesn't need to be competing with you. Just happy to watch and listen. Hey, that's so cool, thank you. Yeah, I don't know why the music was so loud. Strange. I'm going to adjust it a little bit. Let me know on your end again if it's too loud or not. If it's too loud, I'll just turn it off. I love sketching to music. I can just put it on kind of here somehow. It's all good. I'll pull up the image I'm kind of working off of here, bring it on screen.

Boom.

Um, so this bridge is in Central Park near the Central Park Zoo, and I took a tour of Central Park, I guess about 2 weeks ago. It was really fun, about a 2-hour walking tour. Um, just really such a cool place, and I snapped a couple of pictures, and I thought it'd be fun just to sketch this bridge. Little kind of walkway underneath here. I'm going to shade this in here.

Music always my heart.

That's cool. Yeah, I love listening to music when I'm pretty much doing anything. Yeah, and different types of music, I'll sketch and paint and create and think in different ways. Music is definitely inspirational. So I'm sketching, uh, here's this cool bridge. One of the really fun things I learned about Central Park when I was on this tour is that one of the design principles or themes of the park is where you have these roadways here, and they're really cool. Actually, it's the opposite. Yeah, I'm trying to think again. So it's kind of over and under philosophy where you could be walking in the park over these bridges and underneath you is where cars will be going, but you really don't even know that the cars are on or going underneath the pathways the way it was designed. So it's just a really cool layout of the park. Let's see, we have some cobblestone So I'm just sketching tonight with a Sharpie. Boom. And I pulled out my, um, this 1264 Fabriano watercolor book, 7 by 10 inches. We're just doing some loose sketching on here. Of course, when you sketch bridges, bridges always have these has this keystone piece right here. Or when sketching arches, I should say, the keystone locks all these stones in place.

There we go. Cool.

And then, uh, we have some kind of cobblestone thingies here, but they're paver stones. I just want to represent them without actually sketching them all, so kind of at an angle. So I'm just going to do this really, really loose just to get the sense that there's some kind of stones happening in here.

There you go.

There's a kind of a little sidewalk here. I'm going to put some vertical lines just to indicate the height of this walk— sidewalk here. Helps create kind of an edge happening. Boom! Hey, Linda's in the house! Linda, great to see you. Hope all is well. You guys are awesome, so fun. So you guys are on watching on YouTube. I love that, that's cool. Let me know if anybody out there is on Facebook because, um, I was having trouble streaming to Facebook the other day. So I don't know if it's making the Facebook peeps or not. So what I like about this scene is right here's, here's kind of the bridge here, and I'm just framing it really simply with just to indicate some landscaping or some trees on the side here. And I'm just kind of scribbling in. Unfortunately, they look like more like stones. They're supposed to be leaves, but that's okay. Kind of landscape or foliage here. I gotta, I gotta practice my foliage. Sketching, especially with the fall coming up, because I love the fall. But I think I'm just going to keep this one black and white. I'm not going to add any color to this scene. I like— actually, what I like is I like the curve here goes this, like this line. It's kind of fun. I just kind of flows like this. And I like how that curve is, um, kind of opposite to the straight cleaner lines at the top here. Then we do have some growies down here, some shrubbery happening. We'll show us growies. Like this. Boom. Literally just kind of scribbling these in here. Here we go. Just indicate the idea that we have some kind of shrub happening down at the base. Um, I want to just darken the underside here a little bit more as it gets further away, so I'm just gonna I'm gonna hatch this in a little bit here. Boom. There you go. And I just wanted to darken this edge just so that it kind of frames or leads your eye back here, so, so you know the pathway is continuing. Yeah, yeah, let's see, we got some peeps. I'm gonna sketch some figures in here just so you can see the scale of this compared to some people. So here's like a person right here. Let me sketch another one. So you got a couple people. That gives you a good sense of how high this opening is, um, this is here. And what else we got? Maybe there's a little Little kid here with them. Cool. So I'll zoom in so you can see them a little bit closer. So that's what the scene looks like. Hey, Andrea, good to see you. Hope all is well. So awesome to see you guys joining. I appreciate this so much. If you're on YouTube, I would love for you to hit that thumbs up button. Just give me a like. Believe it or not, when you hit that, it sends a signal out to more people and you'll get more people watching. How fun would that be? So thank you guys so much. Ta-da! Pretty cool bridge quick scene. Maybe I'll sketch something else. Let's see. I don't think I'm going to add any more to this one. I kind of like it. Like that. So this is— I wish I knew the exact location, but it's near the Central Park Zoo. As you kind of walk into the zoo, that's where this, um, where this is happening. Such a cool place. Let me see, I might just do a vignette or a small thumbnail sketch of another scene. I'm just going to look through my pictures here. Uh, what do I want to do?

Let's see.

Uh, here's another bridge in Central Park. I'll pull this on here. Maybe we'll do a We'll do a real quick sketch of this, this bridge also. Grab a new sheet of paper. Pretty cool. I like this, this bridge. It's like the brickwork on here, and I like how the kind of the stones around the arch top. You can really see them. They're defined. They pop out. Um, really cool. I don't think I have a picture of— let's look at my photos. I don't know if I have a picture of going through the—

oh, I do.

Here, check out the inside of this. Hold on a second. Boom. So this is inside. Look at that brickwork in there. It's really cool. Right, this would be fun. Actually, let's, uh, let's do a little vignette of this interior. Just want to see if I can capture the feel of it. This is a good perspective exercise, looking down inside this kind of underpass area. Let's, let's give this a shot. Hey, Eraset says, uh, "Love the long swooping line that you showed before of the bricks up to under the bridge." Oh, thanks. Yeah, let's take a look at that. Let's go back a sec. Appreciate your comments. Oops, that's the wrong page. Uh, actually, here, this is kind of just a cool little thumb— it's bigger than a thumbnail sketch, but this is a little perspective street scene I did while I was watching The Urbanist Exploring Cities on YouTube. His name is Ariel. Ariel's awesome. He's in Greece right now, and I was watching him in Greece, and I just did a quick sketch of a kind of an alleyway he was walking down. This was a fun, I don't know, maybe 6-minute or 7-minute sketch I did while watching YouTube. So really cool. Let's go to the— here's the bridge we just sketched. So yeah, so here's that line you were talking about, right? This kind of swoop here, this boom. It's a really— I, I like it also because it's just— I don't know, I just love the way it connects. And it helps create that sense of depth and perspective coming back. And then it's showing the back of that arch, but it's just a fun clean line. So, uh, good. I like that you caught that. Thunder Pass has been a lot of movies. Yeah, the one with the brick. So Central Park has been featured in tons of movies for sure. Um, Home Alone 2 is Probably one of the most popular ones that features Central Park. But yeah, so, um, I should go back and study the names of the bridges. There's a poetic flow to it. I like that. All right, cool. Let's, uh, let's do this kind of quick perspective. I'm gonna keep it pretty small, I think. Let me do like a thumbnail. So thumbnail is here, right? That's thumbnail. Let me see, let's— I'm going to challenge myself actually. Let's use this little coaster and we're going to sketch inside this square. How big is it? This square is about 2.5 inches. So let's just, for the heck of it, let's just mark the corners, and we'll, we'll just keep our sketch in the square just for fun. So I like to sketch frames sometimes. They're, it's, they're fun, and it's my sketch, might go outside of it, and that's cool. All right, so let's see. So we kind of had this little archway in the back here. This is going to be really quick and loose, guys. And then we kind of have this coming up like here. Boom. Got some— this kind of comes out this way. We got a brick beam here, another brick theme happening here. Uh, that's so cool you picked up that bridge being in a lot of movies.

That's so cool.

And then we do have a couple— we have some arches happening back in here. And this is just real quick, trying to capture the idea. There's arches, another arch here. Notice that I'm like, I'm going over the same lines just to darken some of them. We have these cross vault pieces, these It's called a barrel ceiling, barrel vault ceiling, the shape of it, because it curves like a barrel does, right? So we're sketching this barrel vaulted ceiling in there. Let's see, we got this. And these arches are actually little niches or niches that have some depth back to them. So I'm just going to do this here to create the idea we have a little niche going on. Do the same thing here. So these lines are essentially, um, kind of scribbles, right? Just kind of scribbling this here to give this a sense of depth to this niche or niche. We should take a poll. Who says niche? If you say niche, put number 1. If you say niche, put a number to. Do we have more niches or niches out there? I see— I think I see niche. This is tricky. And then I'm going to sketch lines. Zoom in a little bit. And I'm putting lines in here just to kind of go with the idea of a perspective. So they're kind of going back at an angle. We'll do the same thing back in here, maybe here.

Boom.

And I'm just gonna really— I'm sticking with the same pen, the same Sharpie. If I had, I could take a fine liner and draw thin lines here where the bricks would be. Probably would be better for this sketch, but I'm actually being lazy. I'm just gonna challenge myself to sketch everything with the Sharpie pen. I shouldn't say lazy, pushing myself to sketch everything with the Sharpie pen. So these would be the idea of the bricks kind of going back. Goes back. There's a, there's a little raised curve here, also on this side. And then let's sketch, sketch another person here, just get a sense of the idea of the height of this kind of arch. Person here, another person kind of walking there. So that's just a real quick 2.5-inch by 2.5-inch square, just an idea to capture a feeling of that barrel vault, I should sketch some of the brickwork up here. Let's try to keep it really loose. Let's see what happens. I'm barely pushing my Sharpie on the page because I want to keep these lines fairly light. So we'll just do this. Cool. And then I'll zoom in. You can see how it picked up the texture of the paper. And I think for me that's enough just to create the idea. 2, 2 for Niche. We got some 2s going on. Awesome. Hey, Linda's in the house! Good to see you, Linda. Hope all's well. Always great seeing you. We have Linda S and Linda H. Let's see.

So fun.

So, I don't know, do you guys like this little vignette? I love doing vignette sketches or thumbnail sketches. Let's just— I'm going to make something up right now. I'm not going to look at any photos. Let's just sketch a vignette. Again, I'm going to start with a frame. I don't know what this is going to be. We'll just do a rectangle maybe. Then, um, it's a sketch. Just got an idea since we were talking about bridges. Let's do kind of a— maybe a building in a city. Maybe we have a pedestrian kind of bridge happening across here. We'll sketch in idea. We have some windows going on. I might actually pull out one of my old sketchbooks and show you guys, uh, some really cool thumbnail sketches I did in college way back when. Some of my favorite sketches still to this date. Let's just draw kind of a curve. Maybe this bridge, pedestrian bridge, continues across a little bit. All right, so maybe we have some more windows here on this building. And that's, that's it. That's just another quick vignette, a real small sketch. Um, maybe we'll just show— let's just show a skyscraper or something happening. Back in here in the distance. Maybe something Empire State Building-ish kind of going on back there. So if I zoom in, you can see we have a building edge here, does something like that. Boom, our sky bridge is right here. Notice how our building does continue down. Um, I like to break the frame I sketch sometimes, so you'll see things extending outside the frame. I kind of did it here as well. And back here is where I was imagining the tall skyscraper happening in the distance. Shade it in a little darker. So something like that. Linda says 2 works for me. Awesome, you guys are in the niche club. So it looks like niche is winning over niche. Was not worth the price of admission today, just saying.

Cool.

So there's a couple of quick little sketches. Um, I'm not— if I'm not even going to draw people on this because, uh, how could I do that? No, people would be really small on the sketch. But let me pull out the sketchbook and show you something. It should be right here.

Should be right here. It's in here. I got it.

All right, sorry about that, I found it. I'm back. Let me zoom out. All right, so here is a sketchbook from Do I dare say the year? 1993. This is from 1993, this sketchbook. This is, uh, one of my college sketchbooks. But here are some of my favorite thumbnail sketches I've ever done. Let me bring this out here. Here we are, here's a page of them. So these are really small. These are like, heck, this is like 2 by 3 inches right there. I'll zoom in so you can see it better. So this was a, we were designing a building. These are conceptual sketches. I love to do these really quick small sketches to show my professors my ideas. Rather than taking a lot of time to do a big sketch. When they're there talking to you or they're on their way to your desk, you gotta be— you gotta— I don't sketch on here, but you gotta throw down something quick to have a conversation, otherwise they're on to the next person. But here, this is cool. I actually added some color to this one. This was done 1993. It's an interior perspective of a courtyard. So it was a building I was imagining designing that had outdoor seating here, uh, in the building, had an open square, kind of an open plaza in the building. So pretty fun little thumbnail sketch. And here's a little street view kind of perspective. And then these are some elevation type sketches and a floor plan idea. I know I have more of those, but I can't find them. This is a really cool one right here. I love this one. This is— just shows kind of a building entry with This canopy kind of hanging over the edge. Pretty awesome. Andreas says, "You've inspired me to challenge myself, work small and loose." Ooh, yes! That's so awesome, love it. I would love to see, you know, what you're sketching. That would be so cool. I'm a fan of thumbnails, especially when done right. They can convey a lot of info. Yeah, right, exactly. These small sketches can convey a lot. I wouldn't say I've mastered them, but I have fun doing them. This is a cool one. Here's a kind of an interior sketch of a building. There's a real small axonometric or kind of a 3D sketch. I'll see if I can get a couple more in here. This is kind of interior. Oh, we're just talking about the word niche, niche. Look, I have it right here. Niche with statue or niche with statue. So I just did a thumbnail sketch of that. Well, not just now, I did that 1993, right? God, was that 20 years ago? Holy cow! No, wait, am I doing the math right, guys? No, 30. Uh, wait, I don't want to do that. Um, holy cow, I'm drawing a blank. '93, 2003 would have been 20 years. 30 years? Oh my gosh, this sketchbook has lasted the test of time. Uh, let's see if there's a few more and then we'll wrap up. Yeah, here's like, here's another cool little thumbnail sketch. An entry plaza. I used to love— actually, we'll do it on here. Uh, maybe we'll try it on here. I'm gonna lose that building if I do. I just love coloring the skies black in the background, make the buildings pop. I was gonna try it on here, but we'll lose the Empire State Building. And this sketchbook also has an all wrap-up. I've probably shared this a few times online. If I was to keep any of my sketchbooks, I have a lot of them, and I can only keep one, this would be the one I keep. This has my most favorite, favorite sketches of New York City in it. Right? And I've showed this before, so I apologize if you guys have seen these, but this is from 1993, the World Trade Center. I was a young architect wannabe working for an architect in Hoboken. Took a walk on my lunch break to— we're by Stevens Institute— and had this beautiful view. Across the Hudson, looking at the World Trade Center. This, this is my number one favorite sketch of all time. Love it, love it, love it. And then number two, right behind that, really close second here. Another sketch showing the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, actually way back here. Pretty cool. There's a boat on the Hudson, and then, uh, this is just another view along the Hudson of New York City. I wish I knew what building— it looks like some kind of power plant. I don't remember what that was. There you go. I could go through this whole thing, but That's it. Oh wait, no, that's not it. These are the other thumbnail sketches I really love. I'll show you quick. These are some interior studies of stairways for a museum project we were— a conceptual museum project we were designing. I just love these thumbnails. So you can see my style has kind of stayed a lot. The same. Did I say that right? Has stayed very similar over the years. I'm sorry, I know half my face is on camera here. I redid my desktop this afternoon and not everything's back exactly where I had it, right? These are just some other really quick thumbnails Oh, sketches. So there you go, that's kind of a little walk down memory lane. Just thought it'd be fun to show you guys some of those sketches from 1993. This was— I'm trying to read the brand— there was actually 15% more paper in the sketchbook. Wish there was a price tag on it. I don't know how much it cost in 1993. Probably like $3. And to me it's priceless. So yeah, I would love to get this like bound. How cool would that be? Maybe somehow get it leather-bound. I don't know if that's possible, but that would be so fun. And then here's— so I'm still going down the same path, sorry. Here's one of my early, early, early, early, probably very, very first sketch ever of the Statue of Liberty. Right here. Very, very first attempt back in 1993. Pretty cool. And I think that's the White House, and I think that's the Eiffel Tower. All right, awesome. Good stuff. All right, guys, so— hey, thank you for sharing them. Hey, you're welcome. Very, very welcome. Let me move the camera over. Yes, I did my hair tonight. Can't you tell? No, I did not. Um, impressive. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing. Very cool to see your earlier work. Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate you guys. So yeah, so a couple quick little thumbnails here, and then we'll look at the bridge we did first, and then we're going to wrap up. I will show you one other thing, and I'll talk about a series I'm gonna be doing once a month here live. Boom, there you go. So I think this one is done, guys. It's good, right? Here, I'll try to find the exact location, but for now we'll just put a Central Park I did actually some sketches on location when I was there too. I'll show you guys those another day. And now let's put the month and then the year, 08/23. Cool. So before we wrap up, there's one last thing I'm gonna quickly just talk about or throw out there. We'll look at this here because it relates to to this sketch. So recently I had the opportunity to go to Princeton University and meet up with a friend of mine, Chip, and we just kind of— he's been there a few times before, he kind of walked me around the campus. Didn't do much sketching but did a lot of photography there. It was an incredible, incredible day. So what— and Chip was kind of an inspo for this idea. I was thinking of coming online maybe once a month and just go through the photographs I took, and we'll just sketch buildings on Princeton, on the Princeton University campus. Um, this is the cathedral there, real quick sketch. And I thought it'd be fun just to sketch the buildings and maybe talk a little bit about them and You guys can sketch along if you want. So that'll be happening once a month and don't know what I'm gonna call it yet. Just maybe Sketching Princeton or something like that. So just be kind of a show that has a little more focus because you know, you guys know I just kind of pop on and sketch random things. So there you go. Let me know if that sounds cool to you. You guys are amazing. Linda says, "Sounds good." Thank you, Linda, I appreciate that so much. And again, they're going to be just quick, loose sketches in my style. I'm not going to be doing detailed sketches. But you know, instead of doing a whole— this is not the whole building, it's a part of it. But maybe you will even sketch, um, I'll show you a picture. Let me see if I can bring one up. Uh, the doors, the doorways, I've Princeton University are incredible. I spent hours and hours walking around photographing doorways. Let me see if I can find a picture here. And yes, I'm nerdy like that. I get excited looking at doorways. I know it's weird, but here, I'll pull a couple on here. I'll show you guys just for fun. Here's one here. Pretty cool. Look at this. It's like neo-gothic architecture. Zoom in. This really cool doorway. Pull a couple more up. Here's another one. Boom. Heck, maybe we'll just call it like the doorways of Princeton University. We'll just sketch some doorways. That's a cool one. What else? There's another one.

I'm sorry, boom.

Doorways, and there's lots of archways like the one we, we did an archway tonight. Here's an archway. Kind of looking at the inside, right? This is kind of cool because there's an archway You look through, it's framing another archway in the back. Love those Gothic doors. Yeah, right, Araseth? They are pretty amazing. Oh my gosh, the craftsmanship in just the doors. Uh, here's a building— sorry, I'm getting excited here— here's a building that blew me away with the details. I'm just gonna do a close-up here. I mean, just look at this window and the carvings. Holy moly. Oops. And one more, and then we'll— then I'm wrapping up. Here's the last one we'll look at.

Boom.

Pretty cool door here. Love the blue, love the arches, how the door is recessed back in. Check out these lion carvings right here wrapped around— these are drain pipes coming down, copper drain pipes. Check out the— those carved stone lions.

Wow.

Yeah, this is amazing. Hey, great photos! Thank you so much, I'm glad you like them. Yeah, it was so much fun just going and taking pictures. So yeah, so stay tuned and, um, we'll be sketching some Princeton stuff. You guys are awesome, thank you so much for watching, I appreciate you all. Um, hopefully the music volume went way down, so thank you, Araseth, for letting me know about the volume of the music. That was very helpful. And you guys are amazing. I will be back sketching soon. Till then, keep paying it forward with positivity through creativity. And yeah, guys, peace and live creatively. See you soon. Oh, there's the camera. Told you I moved some things around. There's my arm in front of the camera. Um, take care, guys. Oh boy, enjoy your week, everyone. Yes, Linda, you enjoy your week also. Yeah, it's Wednesday. I go back to school in 2 more weeks. It's getting closer and I'm excited.

Good night, guys.