In this informal livestream, Jason Nicholas (Inkspired Life) greets viewers, shares a brief tech‑related mishap with his camera, and sets a positive, relaxed tone. He explains his intention to sketch daily despite feeling under the weather, inviting audience interaction throughout. Jason introduces a range of drawing tools—white gel pens (Gelly Roll), Sharpie Creative Marker, China marker, marking pencil—and demonstrates their performance on black paper while sketching the Brooklyn Bridge. He walks through his process: establishing outlines, adding cables, varying line weight, using hatching and smudging for texture, and experimenting with different pen sizes. Throughout, he reflects on mindset themes such as listening to one’s body, embracing playfulness, and learning from trial‑and‑error. He also muses on potential uses for the finished illustration (e.g., t‑shirt graphics, logos) and ends with a motivational sign‑off encouraging viewers to “sketch boldly, live creatively, and inspire endlessly.”
Chapters
Hey, how are you doing? It is, um, Tuesday, March 3rd, 9:31 PM here in the amazing state of Confusion. Actually, state of New Jersey. I'm a little confused because I don't know what the heck is going on with— it's like a tech— I— my camera was upside down and things weren't clicking on and loading up and restarting this and that, but it's all good. Um, yeah. So if you're having a good day, I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with the Inkspired Life, where I just— I love sketching, especially architecture, and I love coming on here just being, uh, spreading positivity through creativity, a little bit of mindset stuff, positive personal development type of stuff. It's just time to hang out and chill for a little bit. It's gonna be a really quick stream, I promise. I always say that. I am exhausted, but I didn't want to give in to the tech gremlins. I needed to come on and do my daily sketching. So, uh, hope you're having a great day. Feel free to say hello in the comments. Let's go to the desk cam. Bum bum bum bum. There we go, and it is oriented the right way. I love it. It was upside down when I first started. Ah, yeah. All right, take a deep breath, right? So I'm gonna do some sketching. I have some tea here. I am feeling under the weather, U-T-W, under the weather. But I want to do my, uh, get my sketching in today. All right, I'm gonna be playing some music. If it's loud, let me know, but I want— I just want to hear some tunes. The man says as he can't hear any tunes. See, I told you it was a tech kind of day. What the heck? This is cray-cray. Oh my God. You know, 99.9% of times it— well, I'll say 99.1% of the time it's usually white paper, or I'll go to the kraft paper. I thought we'd do some black paper tonight, and maybe we'll try some white gel pens and just play around something a little bit different. So hope you're doing awesome. Let me see if I can get some music going here in my ears. Um, if that doesn't work, I'll just have to go to my phone. All right, we're gonna go to the phone. Let me put on some tunes. Let me know, how is your day going? Are you having a tech day, like a tech issue day? I don't know, actually everything went well in school. The printers worked, the computers all worked, and now at home it's like, what the heck's going on? So maybe the tech is a little under the weather, kind of like, like me today. So we just all might need a little, little rest, and that's fine, right? Sometimes we have to listen to ourselves, listen to our bodies, listen to our minds, and they tell us, they tell us when we need to slow down, take a deep breath, and just rest up a little bit more. So, um, there you go. And I can hear music. Life's good. All right, so I'm going to use the white gel pens. I have a couple different things here. I have some Gelly Roll pens, which are spectacular. Um, which I— maybe a Sharpie creative marker, which is spectacular as well. And I also have this marker. I call them China markers, I think, because you can actually write on China with them. Um, so I have a white one. So let's see how each one kind of works here, and I'm going to sketch the Brooklyn Bridge. All right, make sure you can see everything in frame. I'm gonna zoom in. I like the way the white ink is, um, showing up against the black background. I think it looks kind of neat. Yeah, I like the way it looks. Um, in my brain I'm thinking if I want to do it— I'm not going to. I was going to think about doing some kind of background color, um, to make the arches and the bridge pop, but I don't think I'm going to do that. I do need to show the cables, so we'll do that next on here. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments. Or if you just want to say hola. Some nice tea. Okay, let's do the cables. These would have been cool to do in a different color, but I don't really— I don't think I have any colors that would stand out against the black. Black is a tough background color to work with, but that's okay. I I still really like this. Oops, I have two sheets here. Bonus! That was a bonus find. Who knew? Who knew? I'm curious to see how this Sharpie Creative Marker looks on here. I want to kind of— to pull out the edge of the bridge here. Something for a thicker line. Oh, I think this will do the trick. Yeah, so that really bolded, bolded it up here. So I like the way that's popping out. We'll do the same thing around the arches. I just want to pop these out a little more. Yeah, I like that. I think the, I think the creative marker looks really good on here. So we have that, that And do I want to try this, the marking pencil? This would show up as well, but I don't think I need it on here. I, I say as, uh, I throw it on there a little bit. I'll throw some down here maybe just to give it a little kind of shading, which is cool. I like the way that went on there because you can still see through underneath to the black. So it's not so, um, um, opaque, right? You can see through, which I like. Pretty cool. And let's do— let's show some like chain link fencing on here. See, this is a point— what size? Is this? That's a 1.0 if I have the right cap on. Looks like a 1.0 point. I'm looking for a thinner one. This is 0.5. Yep. And what is this one? 0.8. Let's go try an 0.5 on here, which would be just a thinner line. And maybe where the, the chain link is, we can do that a little bit thinner. And I was using this— this was my reference I was using from the other day. All right, I'm gonna wrap this up in a couple minutes. Oops. Yeah, I do. I really like how thin this line is. It's kind of subtle. It's not overpowering the other lines, which is kind of exactly what I needed. All right, so you can kind of see that this looks cool. I am I wasn't sure how it, how it would turn out, right? It just goes to show you, just be playful, try different things. They may work out, they may not, but in the end we'll learn what we like, what we don't like. Um, we can always take a little piece of stuff with us out of everything we do. I should, uh, maybe I'll show I'm going to show some of the blocking on here. Where's that? This is the 05, right? Yeah. So I'm holding the pen really, really loose and just gently gliding it over the paper. I don't want these lines too heavy. Think of them as kind of just background detail lines. And if I held the pen tighter and I slowed down the stroke, it would— they'd be darker, more intense. But I don't want that. I want really kind of a faded type of line. So that's cool. I like that level of detail. I like how, um, this is a very graphic kind of look, very like— what am I thinking of? Not an icon, um, just a very punchy kind of graphic. Has a very To me, it has a very urban kind of urban vibe to it, which I really like. This, this might make a cool, like, a print that you'd see on a t-shirt. Maybe I can imagine kind of putting it on my shirt there. That could be a cool logo. And I, I like the smudgy lines too. I mean, I smudged here by mistake, but I like it. It has that grunge kind of vibe. Um, here I kind of like this, and I have a little dot here. Again, it adds to that grunge kind of vibe. Lines crossing over each other. It's definitely not clean. It has a technical It has kind of a technical slash grunge vibe to it, if you know what I mean. It's kind of a mix, which is interesting. So that's— I really am digging that so much. I don't have a white frame, do I? No. And this is— wait, I'll be near Michael's this week, so I'm going to pick up some different frames. But here's kind of a black frame on it. Let's flip it over. That works that way. I was wondering where the sound was. Um. Even if, even if you framed a small part of this and cropped it out, which could be an interesting piece. I'm wondering, let me zoom in. I was wondering to myself, like, would this still translate as being the Brooklyn Bridge if someone saw just, we'll say, kind of maybe this portion of it? Might be hard to tell. Obviously I know what it is, so I'm going to be very biased, but I think it would be hard for someone to tell what I'm sketching. There's really not enough info there. I really like the hatch lines here as well to give it a little bit of depth, kind of really scribbly hatch lines here. Those are fun. And just— and the texture of kind of the wood planking and that marking pencil I used. Awesome. All right guys, I think that's a wrap for today. Until we meet again, sketch boldly, live creatively, and inspire endlessly.
