Jason Nicholas finishes a Statue of Liberty torch sketch with gouache, Sharpies, and colored pencils, layering reds and details while chatting with viewers. He adds the phrase "be the light" as a tribute to his friend Chip, and talks about sketching as a way to decompress after a long day.
Hey, Jason Nicholas Nicholas here from The Inspired Life. Happy Thursday, December 18th, 2025. Hope you're doing awesome tonight. I, um, give me on briefly tonight and here's what I want to do. So I started this sketch here yesterday of the Statue of Liberty torch, um, with Sharpie. Ballpoint pen. And mostly what you see here is, um, gouache. So I've been playing around gouache a couple— for a couple of sketches. Here's a container of gouache, and I really like it. It's like a really thick, opaque watercolor type of material. I know it's probably not exactly right, but, um, hold it closer, you can kind of see how things are looking. Tonight I want to come in to kind of finish this sketch up. I'm going to break out some Sharpie creative markers, color pencils, and probably a black Sharpie, and we'll pull out some of the shapes. So stick around for, uh, for some more work on this sketch, for some pro tips, um, creative mindset tips, and some chat. Hope you're doing great today. All right, so, um, what I have out here, I have my Sharpie Creative Markers. I love this. This is, this is non-sponsored, but I love Lockbee. I love their products. I actually have a discount code on screen. Feel free to check them out. I use this to hold my Sharpie Creative Markers. And on the other side, I have a bunch of, uh, pens, some pencils actually. So it's a really great, great EDC, everyday carrying kit. So I love it so much. So I'm going to grab some markers we're going to use tonight. Let's see, I'm just picking out colors. I'm not sure if we'll use them or not. And then also in this Lockbee— this is called the Lockbee Quattro— I keep my colored pencils in here. So yeah, let's just start doing some sketching. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, where you're watching from. I see Kiko. Kiko, how are you? I will, I will see you one of these days at a bowling match. Uh, I know there's one in January, a senior night one that, uh, M asked me to go to, so I will be there. Great to see you. I'm going to zoom in so you guys can see this closer. I love sketching for many reasons. One of them is just it's a really great way for me to wind, wind down and kind of chill out for the night. Um, so that's always a good thing for me to do after a busy, busy day, a long day. Always got a lot of things in my brain. Sketching is a great way just to clear out some of the clutter of the day. There we go, I think you can see it better. Where's my Sharpie? I always have a backup Sharpie. The man says as he doesn't see a backup Sharpie. Um, here, I always got me some Sharpies around. I cannot live without them. This, this is my go-to sketching tool. 90— I'm gonna say 98.9% of the time is I go for a Sharpie marker. Sharpie is not working well on— it doesn't work well on top of colored pencil. And this one looks like it's running out of marker goodness. We'll see how far we get with it. So I'm just using the Sharpie to go back over this, pull out some of the shapes a little bit stronger. I'm not done with that, but we'll come back. Alright, I think this one might be done. Uh, almost, almost done. Let's see, one I just want to pull out— I want to pull out the edge of the flames here a little bit. All right, I think this one's done. I kind of like it. Um, I love, I love how the colors are popping here, especially the reds. This is kind of popping in that area. Um, let me, let me just pull up— let me pull out another torch so I can just compare them. What's fun about doing these torch sketches is they're never the same sketch twice, and I love that. So here's some of my previous sketches. We got another one here. Boom. Right, you see how they're all kind of very different from each other? Yeah, I like it. Awesome. And it's gonna finish it up. Let me just write on the side, on the side here, and we'll call it a day on this one. So shout out to Chip, my friend Chip, who, um, came up with my— the idea to write 'be the light,' and I really love that. Let's see, is this the right one? No, I think I need this one. So let's see, we got 'do be the light.' All right, there you go. Be the light. Boom. And there you go. Thank you so much for watching me on this journey of sketching. I should be counting these, but this is probably torch number— man, I don't even know— 25 maybe. Um, appreciate your time. I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with The Inkspired Life. Till we meet again, sketch boldly, live creatively, and Inspire endlessly.
