Thursday Night Sketching

Oh, hey. It's Thursday, February 26, 2026. Look at that. 26. 26. I hope you're having an amazing Thursday. I'm Jason with the inspired life where I love sketching. I love sketching architecture. Just love getting things out of my head onto paper. Whether it's sketching or. Or painting watercolors, it doesn't matter. It's all fun for me and hopefully share some of that. And it comes across on these live streams where we do some sketching, we'll do some chatting, we'll do a little bit of positivity, mindset, and whatever else comes our way. These are unhearsed, unscripted, and unreal. I don't know. Unreal. I guess they're real, but unreal. Anyway, hope you're doing great. It's been a long day. I am tired. My brain is really tired. My voice might sound tired, but I am. I am trying to practice consistency this year, so I don't know what day consistency. I've been on live streaming I don't know how many days straight in a row now, and it's like building a muscle, right? The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. And I wasn't gonna go live tonight because I'm so, so tired, but my inner gut said, you know what? Keep the habit going. And I'm here for a little bit. We'll do some sketching. I'm going to start off kind of light and breezy, and I want to add some color to this Grand Central Terminal sketch we did last night. So we're going to chill for a few minutes, add some color. And I don't. And my dog is back there playing and barking. So if you hear sounds, that's not my stomach growling, it's my pup. They're playing out there. So I don't know what I'm gonna sketch after this. I had a couple of thoughts, but we'll see where it goes. I can't make this timing up. Welcome to the world. All right, let's throw down some colors. Feel free to say hello in the chat. This is not about me. It's about us. And let's have a. Let's have a conversation. That would be so fun. So last night, we. In the chat, I think. I think it was Gigi maybe suggested sketching Grand Central Terminal. So I kind of. We did a quick little sketch here with a Sharpie on this. I love. I've been loving this craft paper. It's pretty thin, so you can't really do a watercolor in it. But you can use these creative markers, which work really well in here. We did a quick perspective demo as well. So if you want to learn how to do a quick down and dirty kind of perspective sketch, check out last night's live stream. You can see that sketch on there. All right, cool. I'm just picking out colors with these markers. I just. Just really throwing some color down, guys. It's. I need spring. I'm ready for spring and the flowers and the trees and walks in the park after dinner. So bring it on. Let's see. I'm thinking too much about where I want to throw color, so we're just gonna throw it down. So Grand Central Terminal, if you go there in New York City, it is not the colors I'm throwing down. I like to pick colors out just based on my mood and how I'm feeling and what is within arm's distance, arm's reach. What's that expression? Something like that. So I happen to have these right all right here. And throwing down fun colors is kind of makes. Makes me happy. Although the sketch looked really cool without colors. But we'll make it look even cooler. If you want to follow along with what I'm listening to, you can go on Spotify and find the Ink Spired Life. Have a playlist there that you can kind of hear what I'm hearing. What am I looking for? Let's grab this. What the heck? We'll grab some green, some orange. We got some gray, and we have some black. So. One of the reasons I love sketching architecture, it's kind of. Especially when I go to New York City. It's a way for my brain to organize the chaos of a place. And when I say chaos, I'm not meaning. I don't mean it in a negative way. Chaos, just busy, busy, busy. New York City is filled with so much eye candy, you know, from the architecture, the transportation, the people. There's. It's a system overload. And if I could sit there and. And sketch, it kind of helps me process that chaotic world around me. It slows time down. It's really interesting. I could be sketching in Times Square, which is an insane, insane place. One of my least favorite places. Sorry if I'm offending anybody, but one of my least favorite places in New York City, I kind of avoid it. I don't really like is something. But anyway, I could be in that really busy, chaotic area and sketch there and the world stops. I can block everything out around me. I'm getting lost on paper so sketching is a really fun tool for me to kind of get lost in the moment, slow down time and just process that chaos in a different way. So it's really, it's very, very powerful. So many of you know I'm a high school teacher. I love, love teaching. It's probably the best thing I've ever done career wise. It might even step a notch above architecture, believe it or not. And I love architecture. But teaching, teaching is a crazy. It's crazy. Any teachers out there, you know what I'm talking about. Your days are never the same twice. You never know what's going to happen. It could be mentally draining. During the day I like to have my sketchbook. So if I have my lunch or a prep or even a few minutes between classes, I might just take out my sketchbook and sketch something quick. And it's a good brain reset for me. This is looking cool with color. What else should we color on here? Color some of the people down here. I got little people kind of hanging out. Grand Central Terminal is an incredible monumental space. Another really busy hub. It's a basically a train terminal. And I love, I love sketching in here. I've sketched quite a few times in here and last time I was sketching there was like, like two Saturdays ago. It was really interesting because I'm kind of up looking. This is a view I was sketching, actually. I'm sketching and literally right next to me there was like a fashion shoot going on and like how it felt. I kind of felt in the way, but they never asked me to move. But New York City's fun. You never, you never know what you're gonna see or encounter. So it was kind of a cool vibe that day. And it's always also fun. People just kind of checking out what I'm doing. Sometimes they'll stop and ask if they can see or ask some questions. So it's kind of fun just to connect with people randomly that way. Again. Yeah. That is not my stomach growling. It's my pup playing out there. Alright, my favorite color guys, right here. Boom. We got to throw down some of this turquoise color. Never leave home without it. I'll zoom in so you can see these people a little bit closer. Let's see. Let's zoom in a little bit right. So you, you can see. I'm trying to pop the people out a little bit down there. We'll. I like the way the, what color white pops on this paper. So we're gonna use some. I have a white gel Pen and is this. That's gray. I swear I have white here. If not, we'll just. Oh wait, I picked it up. There it is. Throw some white on here and then we'll play with this. The gel pen as well. I think I'm going to do the ceiling. We're going to do the barrel vault ceiling. I'm going to pull this out in a little bit of white just to play with the curve. You can see it better if I add this. So now you can kind of see that white popping out for the curve of the ceiling. Yeah, this is looking actually pretty cool with color. See, this is a kiosk down here. So we have a little kiosk. So we'll pull this out with a little bit of white. This is the. The twenty million dollar clock here. I think it's twenty million. Just kind of pull that shape out a little bit. It. I like the way this is looking. Let's see. This one might be done. This one might be done. Let me zoom out a little bit. So here's kind of the overview of it. I really like the white of the ceiling. I think it pops out that shape. And I tried to bring the white. You may have noticed I brought a little bit down here that was kind of strategic. I. I wanted to call attention to these perspective lines, these angle lines coming back to just give emphasize kind of the depth of this view going back like that. So I highlighted those in the white and then I brought the white down here almost to make a frame in the distance. Let's throw a. Speaking of frames is kind of through little mat around here. Wish it was bigger, but just to get an idea of what it might look like with a mat around it. Yeah, I like it. Pretty cool. Go back a little bit. This was a sketch yesterday of the NYC skyline with. We were talking about the World Trade Center a little bit. I like how the yellow kind of really helps the buildings pop out. This has been a really fun sketchbook because I've been playing around with things I really have never played around with before. It's, you know, Approach, Approach your creativity like a play playground. Be playful, experiment. Try. Try different things. I mean, it's paper, it's pens, right. Markers, watercolors, whatever ink it. That's all it is. Just different mediums. And never, never for me, I can't think I'm going to create something perfect because if I try to create something perfect, I'll never start. So that's why I love the word imperfect. Imperfect. It's. I am Perfect, right? Imperfect is. I am perfect. Just throw stuff down on paper and you don't know what's going to happen. Oh, this one I never finished. Let's just. I wanted to add some lines to this one. Tonight we just might be a night where I'm just gonna tie up some loose ends on some of these sketches in here. I don't know if I'll start anything. Brandy new. But I wanted to come back in here with a Sharpie. These have been fun cityscapes. Shout out to Jen. Jen on who watches on YouTube. She gave me came up the name Scapes. Scapes SK A P E S. So I kind of liked it. I have this thing for the Empire State Building. I'm. I always see it in these building shapes. This is very loose interpretation, but my brain is seeing, like an Empire State Building kind of happen here. Oh, I don't have a bridge. I just realized that these all have bridges in them. Interesting, right? Bridge. Bridge. I have to. Where am I gonna put a bridge in this one? I think I just kind of see it here. And we're gonna use a. Let's pull it out with a gel pen. Do some white line. There we go. So we have our bridge kind of happening in the foreground. I like it. So if you're looking for a good white gel pen. I really love these gelly roll excellent white gel pens. And I know I think of cinnamon roll when I hear the name, but is there such a thing or is there such a food as a jelly roll? Maybe. But cinnamon rolls are weak. A weakness of mine. So that's where my brain goes. We need a water tower. We need a water tower. Let's do one. Do one right here. Zoom in. A little water tower there. Let's do a few. Let's do one. My brain wants to put one here. And we'll add some color to them. We have three. We got one, two. Where should we do the last one? One, two, one, two. Ah. We'll do one up. Throw one here. We'll actually just kind of use the red and we'll sketch on top of it. We'll sketch. Some kind of tower kind of happening right here. All right, cool. So we have three little water towers. Isn't that like a nursery rhyme? Something about the three little water towers. Oh, wait. Was that the three little pigs? Something like that. Hey, JLM517 rocks. I see you over there on YouTube. How are you? Good to see you, Sakura. Jelly roll is number one. Uniball Signo is number two. Yeah. I agree with you. I have. I don't know if I have a uniball here. I've used both. But I have to agree with you. I think the jelly roll is numero uno when it comes to white gel pens. I don't know if. Let me see if I have a signo in here. I don't think I do. Negative. Negative. I don't have any. Yeah, I love that comment. It's a really good feedback. Thank you so much. So what do you guys think? You like this kind of cool little cityscape? I think it looks fun. I think this one might be a wrap on this sketch. And then we'll flip through and. Yeah. So tonight's kind of a tie up loose ends. I'm just looking through this here, and we're just. I'm adding some things to some sketches. I thought that would be fun. It's a good example that you don't always have to start from scratch, you know, staring at this blank sheet of paper. If you're staring at a blank sheet of paper and you can't figure out what the heck do I sketch? And you're sitting there thinking, thinking, thinking, like, what do I do? What do I do? If you don't know, find an old drawing. Find an old sketch. I keep so many. I have so many in a drawer here. And just flip through them, you know, and look through them. You might see something that sparks you, and you're like, oh, maybe I could throw down some color or throw down some lines on here or add something to it. Right? So don't always feel like you have to start from this blank page when you can start from something that you've already done. That's kind of what we're doing. So it's a good lesson for today. These colors. Smile. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. These are fun colors. I agree. I never. I was afraid of using color on sketches for many, many, many, many years. If you go way back, you'll see everything I did is black and white. And I still love black and white. I still might like it even better than color, but I was afraid to add color because I thought any color I added had to be realistic with what I was sketching. So if I was doing the Empire State Building, I would think, oh, man, I gotta make color so it looks like the Empire State Building. Or, you know, I'm sketching someone's house, I'm like, oh, I gotta make it the same exact color. And I was afraid, paralyzed, stopped in my tracks because I didn't want to commit to making the color match exactly what was there. I trained my brain and I just kind of went inside myself and I'm like, you know what? Who says I have to match colors? Why can't I add any colors I want to with what I'm doing? This is kind of my interpretation of the world. It's how I'm feeling. It's. It's what I have. Honestly. Sometimes it's just what I have available to use. It's. Yeah, it could be winter and I'm using bright colors now because I want spring. So I'm picking colors not based on reality. Of. I'm not a realism. Is a realism word. I'm not a realistic artist. When I do my architectural drawings, blueprints, that's where the technical real world stuff has to happen. This is. This. These are. This is a playground. Cool. What else? Like this thing. I don't know. Let's add something to this. I don't even. This was me throwing down random stuff. Let's see if we could do something to this. I have no idea. We'll wrap on this one. We'll throw some stuff on here and see what we can do with it. This was just me having fun putting colors and acrylics on this paper. I wanted to see if I could do acrylic painting on this thin paper. So let's throw some lines down. Let's. I feel like using white. So if you have any questions, comments, keep putting them in there. We'll. Before I leave, we'll go through and. Yeah, we'll answer some. Hey, Juanita, I see you over on Instagram. Great to see you. I hope all is well with you. I don't know. Again, we're just throwing. We're just going to throw some colors, lines down. Maybe we'll do an over sketch on here. We'll see what happens. You know, I'm going to turn into some kind of building. I'm sure. I am sure about that. It. I'm feeling some purple on this. Let's break out some purple. It. It's. I don't know, maybe we have some kind of modern church kind of structure happening here and I'm just being playful. I wanted to do some over coloring on this. I need some yellow. They do look amazing though. And the colors just add a pop. Yeah, I like. I think you're talking about these, right? These are really. These are cool. They're just blocks of color. And add some lines on top of them, some micro details. Oh, my light went off behind me. That means. I know. That means it's 10 o'. Clock. Cool. All right. Yeah, Maybe we got some. Some kind of like modern church building or something on top of that. You might try mild liners as transparent background color. They are permanent when dry. Actually highlighters, but many colors. Some brush nibs, some chisel. Yeah, I like that. And I do use highlighters. I have some here, actually. So highlighters are a lot of fun to use in your sketching. I love the feedback, guys. You're a Derwent junkie. Am I saying right? Is it Derwent, Dervent, Dewvent, Dervent. I think I have some Derwent color pencils, so I don't haven't used their stuff too much. The inktense blocks of broad size and sharp edges for mark making. The pencils for details also dry permanently. Ooh, I will check those out. Love the pro tips. Juanita says seeing a pattern with the colors. Cool. Yeah. This is just fun, guys. It's a quick overlay. I like it. I mean, this one, I'm gonna leave it again. We're just throwing some stuff down. Let's see if there's anyone more we can add. Torch could use something. I'm not sure what. Some of these go back quite a ways. That was my lighthouse sketching workshop. Barn sketching workshop. This I love. I love this one. It's pretty simple colors, but I think the white is really powerful on this. Hey, Laurie says I am the 998th sub. Two to go. Cheers from Canada. Like your style. Thank you. Lori Jean, 64. That is awesome. Two more to 1K, guys. When you hit the 1K, we'll do the 1K sketch giveaway show. That'll be fun. Thank you so much for subscribing. I appreciate that. We're just doing a little flip through some old sketches here, and I'm just. I'm not starting anything new tonight. I'm just kind of adding to some of these old sketches. Definitely go back and watch the beginning. Hopefully there's some good tips in there. Let's add to this one. This was a sketch I did for my friend Rue. He. He sent me a picture. I did a quick sketch. I don't even remember what color color the building is originally. And like I was saying earlier, I don't. I am not trying to match colors of anything. I'm just going with my gut. I'm having fun with white tonight. We're going to throw some white on here and watch how this building is going to pop. We Add some white on here. The man says as he. I'm having one of those weeks where I lose things. I'm just. I don't know if I don't know what it is I'm losing. Like, I have a green, like, sport jacket thing I wear all the time. I don't know where the heck it is. I lost my green jacket. I lost a sketchbook. I used to do the. The Gotham, Not Gotham. I'm thinking Batman. The Gotham City Cathedral. No, Grand Central Terminal sketchbook two weeks ago. I know it's here somewhere. I lost the sketchbook. What the heck? What else did I lose besides my brain? I'm looking around. I don't know why I'm looking around for things I lost because I'm looking around, and if it's lost, I'm not gonna see it. Did you ever have one of those weeks where you just lose stuff? It is hard. I can sketch and talk. I swear I can do this. Yeah, it's just wacko. It's also like a wonky tech week. Oh, my gosh. I can't get text messages on my phone from. From the bank. I need to try to get my tax form. And it's. That's not working. Internet schools, wonky and live streaming. Last night, I somehow started two streams at the same time. And I'm a tech guy, man. I. I love tech. I'm really good at tech stuff. What the heck? What the tech is going on, right? See how the white is just popping? It's building out, and I'm not going to add white everywhere. I love that craft paper showing through. And we're going to let it show through. Yeah, I'm liking this. I don't even know if I want any more white on this as I keep adding it. And what's cool about these creative markers is they're transparent. Ish. So you can see through. And I love that because I love to see the lines underneath. Like here. Hey, Chip. Good to see you, man. Hope all's well. You. I love to see the lines underneath. So that's one of the cool things about the creative markers is they are transparent. So I'm not hiding up. For me, every line, every mark I throw down is helping to tell the story, showing the energy or sometimes lack of it of how this is being created. So I like to see all the lines, but you can build this up as it dries. I mean, you can add layers and layers. Actually, I think this white one. White one's almost out of ink, but you can Build up the layers if you want. All right, let's throw some yellow on here. I want to. Maybe the lights are on, but no one's home. Tonight's like the night of cliches. I think I've been throwing out cliches. I don't know why not? Usually I'm more of a dad joke guy, not the cliche guy. I just want to pop out some of these window panes a little bit. And let's say we have glass doors down here. Maybe we'll just kind of throw in a little bit of this to kind of pull that out a little bit. Right. So you see how the yellow is just kind of bringing those windows to life a little bit. And if you look close, I'm just kind of dabbing it in here. I'm not doing full blown out yellow colors. I want to just do pops of it here and there. There's a lamppost here. We should do some yellow maybe in the lamppost here. I don't like. I don't like the way that looks. All right, that's better. So maybe we have, like a yellow lamppost happening. Who knows? This could be Twilight. Not the vampire movie or books, but the time of day. Maybe it's Twilight. And now we're going to throw a little bit of purple for shadows. So I want to give this roof some depth. So one of the ways I do is with the hatch lines here. But you know what? Let's throw some purple down, too. Let's do purple hatch lines. Instead of coloring it solid, I'm going to kind of do hatch lines like that and leave some space in between. It keeps that loose, scribbly look I love without adding a big block of purple. Juanitsa says it does give that illusion of light. Yeah. Pretty cool, right? Pretty cool. There's some artists that are really gifted at showing, like, nighttime scenes and having their paintings glow. The name Thomas Kinkade comes to my brain. Thomas Kincaid. I think they called him the painter of light. Actually. He would do scenes like that, but I don't. Yeah, I don't know what else. Yeah, let's throw a little more purple down here. Just give a little depth to these window or door areas. I think these are glass doors. Yeah. Cool. This one might be done too, guys. All right, feel free to put some more comments or questions in there as we wrap up. Anybody that watches, you know, I say we're going to wrap up about 20 times before I wrap up. It is late, though. I have school tomorrow and I'm pretty Tired. But this is fun. This has been fun. So basically tonight was a couple things. I'll do my kind of wrap up if you want to. I'll look in the chat before I leave though and answer a couple things. I think tonight was a night about number one. Don't feel like we always need to start from a blank page. Keep your old sketches, paintings, whatever you're doing, keep them around and look through them like we did tonight. I was looking through here. Like here we started Grand Central. I sketched yesterday with just. With. With just a Sharpie. And we added color tonight. And I love the color on here. It's fun, it's playful. Things are popping out. I love the way the people pop out on the bottom with the. Those punches of color. Right. I'm not gonna be able to show every single thing we did here. This. We took this to the next level, added a bridge, added some windows. So that was fun as well. This. I just kind of threw this modern church kind of structure on top of the wacky background that was on there. So that was fun. I feel like this torch needs something, but we're not gonna do that tonight. What else? And the one we just did. Can I find it? Can I find it? Oh, it's right. So yeah, that's kind of lesson. Don't always feel like you need a blank page. You can always come back, add things to things you've done already. And the other thing, big takeaway. And I talk about it a lot is just color and my fear of color and then kind of my mindset, how I change that to adapt color and throwing down color the way I want to do it, not sticking to reality, breaking those rules creates the freedom. Chip says that house actually looks like a department 56 collection. Oh, that's so funny. Let's go back to it. Those are those like Christmas. Little Christmas. I was gonna say figurine houses. Right. Where the heck is it? So, Chip, I don't know if you. When you joined, but that sketch was based on a photo that. That Rue had sent to me. I should send it to him. Cool. Hey, JLM517 rocks says your color shine. Oh, thank you. You're so. You're so kind. I appreciate that. Yeah, I love that. So I'm excited. Thank you to lorigene64 on YouTube. We are now two away from 1k subscribers. I'm so excited. I'm looking forward to doing the 1k sketch giveaway. I think this is how it's going to roll. Don't hold Me to it. I think I'll do. After we get to 1k, I'll do a live stream and hey, Andrew, good to see you. If you're still on. Great to see you, man. Great to see you. I sent you guys, I sent the class a shout out. So thank you for just being amazing. Here's how it's gonna roll. Ready? We'll do a live stream. Whoever is. You have to be live watching. And whoever's watching, I'll put everybody's name in a hat or something and we'll just do a random or we'll use the wheel of names. My students know exactly what that is. They're cringing now. If they hear me saying that. And we'll just do a random drawing. I'll give away a sketch has to be within malleable reasoning, reasonable mailing distance. That'll be fun. So let's get to that one K. Just a personal milestone. Nothing. YouTube doesn't pay me or anything. I don't get any money or anything. It's just a goal I'm aiming for now. I want it. I want to add white to all of these sketches. Now here's a Brooklyn Bridge sketch I did in person March 1, 2025. Almost a year ago, actually. I must have. Yeah, I was. I was in Brooklyn on the bridge about a year ago. Oh, man, I love this. Got the one World Trade center in the background. We got the bridge here. I forgot about that one. I forgot. I actually took this with me into the city. Timeout market, Manhattan Bridge, carousel of progress. This is a view from the Brooklyn Bridge looking down towards Brooklyn Bridge Park. Another kind of Brooklyn Bridge image. So these were done actually on. They were. These were all. These were all done on location. All right, cool. Let's see if there's any final questions or comments. We'll wrap up. I told you. I say that 20 times. I think that was 19. Sup, Mr. Nick? Sketch is looking good. Hey, thank you, Andrew. I appreciate that. Really. Really, I do. And like I've told. Been telling you, your sketches in class are they've taken off. And I love that you're adding color now. That is. That's awesome. Keep it up. You definitely got some skills there. It's good. Good stuff. Love it. Cool. Guys, thank you so much for watching. I have school tomorrow. I don't want to be crankier than I usually am. I'm not always cranky. We all have our moments, though. Today we got a little treat from Duncan. A Dunkin truck came. Someone sponsored a Dunkin truck. They were giving out little refresher drinks and gift cards. So we were treated at school today how I forget who the sponsor was but shout out to them for doing that at our school. It was pretty cool. Pretty cool. All right guys, thank you so much for watching. Next time we will hit the 1k shout out to JLM rocks watching live and Juanita Andrew over there on Instagram. Chip, always, always pleasure to see you. I want to talk to you and and rue. I don't know if you guys are around sometime, sometime this summer I'd love to pop down. I'd love to go down in North Carolina and visit you guys for a couple days. Who else did I miss? Did I miss anybody else? If I missed any other names, I'm so sorry but thank you guys so much. Until we meet again, sketch boldly, live creatively and inspire endlessly. We'll see you.