Wednesday Night Sketch and Chill

Hey, um, happy November 12th, 2025. Jason Nicholas Nicholas here with the Inspired Life. Hope you're having a great, uh, Wednesday today. It is Wednesday. I I think, um, yeah, it is. Yeah, I'm popping on for a few minutes. Um, if you don't know me, uh, my name is Jason Nicholas Nicholas, and I'm an architect, a high school teacher where I teach architecture and CAD. And I just love sketching. I love sketching architecture, and I love urban sketching. So much fun, good escapism for me, good therapy, um, good to exercise my creative muscles as well. Cool. Uh, feel free to leave comments in the chat. I'll be checking in, and I hope you're having a great day. So today I, I'm gonna sketch a bridge that I've all— I think I've only tried sketching one time. Yeah, and that was all— I don't even know, that was a while, a long time ago. So I had a student actually who just came back from San Francisco. He went away and he was, uh, talking about the Golden Gate Bridge. So he had some pictures and I was inspired by him to, um, to do the Golden Gate Bridge sketch. So let's sketch it. If you don't know where it's located, the Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco, California. Um, I think it was opened in the late 1930s, I'm gonna say around 1937. I could be wrong. Um, 1.7 miles long. Doing some memory, so you might want to fact-check me. But let's sketch it, have fun. And, um, if you don't know my sketching style, it's loose, it's wonky, it's quick, it's fun. And I just want to capture the personality of the bridge and just go for it right here on livestream. Kind of my second attempt ever at the Golden Gate Bridge. Cool. All right, I see Chip's in the house. Chip, great to see you. Hope all's well. We definitely need to catch up, 100%. We have to catch up. Um, just before I get started, so you know what I'm using, I am— I'm going to sketch with a Sharpie, and I am sketching in my Fabriano 1264 watercolor Boom, there you go. Watercolor, um, sketchbook. And reason I'm starting with Sharpie is if I want to come back and add some ink wash or watercolor, I don't have to worry about the black ink bleeding. Also, when I use a Sharpie, I'm committed. Once it's down, I'm going for it, not worrying about mistakes, uh, just gonna have fun in the process. All right, let's do it. I am looking at a reference picture too. I don't know this bridge well enough. This will be a tricky one. So I'm breaking it down into some shapes here, kind of staggers out a little bit. But I'm gonna sketch for a few minutes and I won't— I'll keep quiet. I will keep quiet. Alright, this is an interesting one to sketch. So first time I usually sketch a structure, I'm really going even quicker than usual just to see what my brain and hand and eyes are just kind of capturing as I'm looking at a photograph. Another thing I notice is when I sketch like the Brooklyn Bridge, it's usually looking different perspective. It's going the other way on my sketch. This is kind of opposite, so it's messing with my brain. If I had sketched a perspective instead of going this way, going the opposite way, um I think it'd be a different sketch because my brain is— excuse me— my brain's wired to go in the other direction. That's pretty funny, actually. It's a cool observation. I'm going to throw some color on here just for fun. So the color of the, um, Golden Gate Bridge is called International Orange. International Orange. I don't have International Orange paint, so I am— we're gonna try a couple different things. I'm going to throw some orange, just orange watercolor paint on here. Maybe we'll put some red ink on there. We'll see. Oh, I just had— I just had a thought of a color I could use. I'm gonna throw some Inferno Orange on here. Let's throw some Inferno Orange ink.

Cool.

I'm going to throw down some purple. So I'm mixing up some purple over here, just some red and blue. Um, let's see. Excuse me. Um, the rest color exactly what the Golden Gate looks like. Oh, that's cool. Thank you for the feedback. I'm actually— believe it or not, I'm actually just— I'm working off a black and white photo here, so I'm not even— I'm not looking at the color. But, um, that's cool. Yeah, it's very quick, loose sketch. I'm not really happy with the perspective here in the distance, but again, my purpose is I just wanted to capture this quick, throw it down, get a feel for it, see what my eyes capturing. This tower could be more slender. So there are some things I definitely will mod the next time, but you don't know until you do it at least once, right? So don't be afraid to try, try it. Just throw stuff down on paper. After this dries, I'll definitely come back with some Sharpie or ink and pull out some of the details, clean it up a little bit as well. I want to do— I'm just thinking what I want to do for the actual cables coming down. Let's just throw some fun colors. It's gonna use some Sharpie Creative Markers. We'll just throw some fun— um, actually, you know what, I'm gonna— I'm gonna stay with black on this. We're gonna stick with the black Sharpie. Also, the closer I'm looking at this, I'm realizing that these pieces stack up and they get narrower as they go up. So that's a cool observation that I never realized before. Sketching really helps you to see the world in different ways. It's one of the things I love about it. It helps your, um, your eyes to pick out different details and your, your brain as well to process, um, visual stimulation in different ways. So it's really cool. Sketching is really cool, um, muscle building in different ways. Whether it's creativity or just examining the world around you. I'm going to switch to— I'm going to switch to a Sharpie gel pen because this is wet here, but I want to add some hatch lines on it, and the Sharpie marker does not like to write on wet areas. Also, the cables come to the top here, which I'm noticing as well. I like the way this is drawing though, the color is really cool.

Yeah, I'm liking—

I'm actually kind of liking the looseness of this. I think I would actually crop it. Would I have my frames out? Let's crop it. Let's crop it, crop it. I kind of like this cropped, only because I don't— I should have kind of let it ghost off the side and I didn't. I shouldn't have finished it. So we're gonna make our own ghosting by cropping it out. Maybe if the frame was a little bit more horizontal, but I kind of like that crop out.

Cool.

I'm just going to pop a little more orange here in some places. I think this, this one might be, um, this might be a wrap on this one. Yeah, really liking the color on this. Yes, yes, yes. So I'm gonna let this one dry. I'll come back after it dries. We'll add a little more detail. I'll pull this, um, structure out a little bit more, and I think that'll help just pop it. Yeah, this was fun just to kind of throw down. Love it, love it. Awesome. Let me, uh, I'm gonna wrap up and show the last thing I worked on. I want to show you guys how it dried, the Domino Sugar Refinery, which is right here. So here's the sugar refinery building. This was a fun one to recreate. I've sketched it many times. Here's a black and white version I did a while ago. This is the one I did last time. Um, I like— I'm gonna hold it close here— I like the way the colors dried on this. I love the dried kind of the dried edge happening here, or sometimes they call it the hard edge here. Boom. I'm gonna get close to the color so you can just see this a little bit better. I'm loving the colors happening. That's one of the fun things about watercolor and, uh, ink, just, just seeing how it dries. I actually, and I really like the kind of look here as well with the turquoise. And, um, it was also fun to come back and do something I do a lot, a lot in my sketches is I'll just do a red Pilot Precise Ink line around usually either the whole outside of the build— building or part of it. And it just kind of, for me, it's like putting a bow or a ribbon around a package, right? It kind of just dresses it up, neatens it up. And I like how this red line kind of it kind of just wraps it and pulls it all together into a little complete package. And the color bleeding that happened over here is really cool, even up in this area. So that was really fun to throw that, the red pen on there. So yeah, this was a fun, fun sketch. I like the way it turned out. Let me put a frame on this one too. I think I have to start buying— not start buying, I think I need to buy a few or a couple bigger sized matte openings here. This is way too small, but it's actually not bad if I crop it out here. If I crop it like maybe something like this, actually, I like that a lot. Let's try a vertical cropping as well. Mm-mm, I think the horizontal cropping is better on this one. Let's see, let's try that. And let me try one last thing. Let's zoom even tighter. Boom. What if I just did a vertical on this part of the building here? Maybe that's actually not bad. Kind of like— I kind of like doing a vertical here. I love just taking sketches and cropping out smaller sections, right? It's, it's sketches within sketches, artwork within artwork, and it's just fun to see, you know, see what playful combinations of shapes and colors you can get just by cropping out these different areas. Yeah, that's, that's not a bad cropping either, although I like the chimney, uh, more off-center. I think it balances it better having some height on the left. Then you have this white open space in the background. I think it balances pretty, pretty nicely there. Yeah, yeah, very cool.

All right, let me know if any last final questions, comments, or thoughts.

That would be amazing. Um, here's just an example of the Brooklyn Bridge. I talked about the perspective the other way. I'm used to drawing my Brooklyn Bridge perspectives kind of this way. Boom. And it— this Golden Gate Bridge, I tried, I tried to go the opposite way. So Uh, which is a good exercise because my brain was trying to process, process the different perspective on it. So it's good to work your, your muscles in different ways, right? Flex in different ways. Cool. All right guys, this has been fun sketching on this Wednesday night. Um, until we meet again— oh my gosh, I almost forgot how I wrap up the shows. But I didn't. Sketch boldly, live creatively, and inspire endlessly.