 Hey guys just before we start if you're new to my channel just to let you know I have a Patreon down below and I think that you click this video because you're a bookish person so if you are just to let you know that in my Patreon I'm sending out lots of bookish type stickers to everybody who's on the booktier this month and if you want to grab a couple of those very handmade stickers by me and maybe a note and stuff then please check out my Patreon down below and that'll be amazing of you thank you very much here's the video thank you bye hello everybody and welcome back to the average today we are going to do the 100 page challenge which I haven't done for a while and I'm really excited if you're new here you don't know what this is the 100 page challenge is basically when I turn to the 100th page of a book and I get a prompt from reading this page no matter what it could be it could just be something that I'm inspired by by reading the page or the characters or an illustration about the book it's kind of anything goes way to unlock um art block and things like that so let's get to reading this book the alchemist if you guys don't know about this book it's a really popular book it was it's kind of about following your dreams and it's very romanticizing the idea of it's very romanticizing that doesn't make any sense stuff I need to read more books it's very romantic the main character is like no matter what doing what it takes to achieve what he thinks his dreams are and it's a very inspiring book like if you read it they're very inspired to pursue what you want to accomplish in life and yeah I really enjoyed it and I hope that you guys know about it a little bit and if you don't maybe you can look it up now anyway I'm going to read the hundred page to myself and then I'll describe what's happening on the page if I can okay so this page is basically describing our main character being in the Sahara desert after he crosses from um Al-Jasiris in Spain and yeah he's traveling through the desert because he wants to get to Egypt I believe and he's just in this scene he is by campfire and it's kind of a camp area set up and there's like different chieftains there and silk cushions and there's servants with silver trays with spices and tea and yeah that just really does kind of paint a really nice picture of this oasis that they mentioned and the tents and things so I have a really good idea here I don't want to draw like the scene as I'm reading it I want to do maybe hang on a sec I want to do maybe some small scenes again like I did in this video where I painted these small kind of house scenes but I want to do it of different desert scapes and I think that would be really interesting so taking away this prompt from this book of the desert scapes and creating that and I think that will be a really fun little prompt to do so thank you the alchemist for that prompt and let's get to painting okay so after that very basic instruction that I gave at the beginning of this video about this book I realized that I should probably talk a little bit more about the alchemist um I want to try and do a little bit more review of stuff review of stuff review the books a little bit better as I talk about them with my painting and basically the alchemist is about a shepherd um called Santiago who lives and works in Spain and he is a young kid and he's decided that he wants to go and visit Egypt because he wants to find treasure so that he can get a lot of money so he can marry the girl of his dreams and you know be rich and live his life to the fullest so he thinks like he goes there and he goes over to Morocco I think in the beginning like he travels across the straits to Morocco and he gets robbed quite quickly on early on in the in the book and he thinks that's going to send him back home because he can't speak to anyone he doesn't speak the language and then he realizes that he can communicate with people via just understanding each other which I think is a big um point of the book is like we all are human and we all on a certain level understand each other and he even has that with like his sheep and stuff like that that he obviously chappans in the beginning he can understand them so he can understand these other human beings and there's a lot of like symbolism in this book so basically the sheep are the people living their lives who are not following their dreams they're just happy and content with the life they're given and the things that they don't have to work well they do have to work for but they don't push themselves to follow their dreams basically so Santiago's dream is to get treasures beyond his wildest dreams and marry this girl that he's fallen in love with so he goes on this adventure and I don't want to spoil too much of the book but obviously he meets an alchemist in it and things develop and there's a lot more to it than that but I don't want to talk too much about it and ruin it because uh if you haven't read this book then I think you should pick it up because it is really very inspiring it's about really as I simplified at the beginning of this video following your dreams and being inspired to go for it even though it's hard and even though things will definitely go wrong you will fail but you've got to keep going and pursuing things and I think I always take that into account in my own life now I think everybody is going to fail and you've got to constantly fail um it's good to fail we all fail I think when I first started YouTube I had like no subscribers but I kept doing it and steadily my videos would get better I got more subscribers and I think there was always periods of stagnation with YouTube and periods of stagnation with my own art where I couldn't quite do what I wanted or I didn't think that I had the talent or enough skill set to create something like a comic and then I'd go for it and push myself and even if the result wasn't always what I wanted it to be I would always push myself to keep going and I think that's a really important lesson that the alchemist definitely drives home apart from that it is a really like lovely fantastical story and if you like fantasy you would definitely like the alchemist because it's sort of whimsical but fantastical at the same time but also kind of rooted in realism in the sense that it is kind of historical fiction because it is set in Andalusia in Spain and the Morocco and then the Sahara and then Egypt and yeah it's it's it pulls in elements from the past of those countries and it has definitely a very rich a very rich cultural context behind it for each country that he visits and each place that he sees I think it's really well written I have read another book by Paolo Kolo I don't know how to say his name at all I'm sorry I have read another book by this guy called adultery and it was very different I did not expect that it was more about a woman cheating on her husband and it was really weird I was like some point this book is going to be similar to this one and it just wasn't it was a contemporary book and it wasn't badly written but it was just a bit like I don't know it just didn't care about the characters or anything so I have a feeling that maybe his other books aren't as good as this one but this is definitely like the one that everyone speaks about talks about a lot and I don't know if you've read it let me know in the comments and if you read it did it affect you or did you maybe you didn't like it at all I haven't heard anybody who hasn't liked this book but maybe you didn't like it but yeah so this obviously is very far removed from what I'm painting here because in my paintings I am just doing images that are inspired by the desert like not necessarily the Sahara because as I found images that I really wanted to practice doing I realized that they aren't or the Sahara because the Sahara doesn't look like that it looks like they're more deserts in maybe the Americas or somewhere else and yeah like I felt like I really wanted to be a little bit more experimental like I said I'm doing that style like free and easy expressionist style and I'm really leaning into it and I think like as I'm looking back because a little private note here I'd be moving house a week so I've been noticing like a lot of my sketchbooks my old sketchbooks from the past and things like that and looking at paintings and things that I've done I'm not even like that far ago in the past as well I'm talking like maybe a year or two and then maybe like five and I'm seeing like a real difference in what I enjoy painting not necessarily like my skill set because I obviously I think my skill set has gotten a bit better but I think what I'm doing now is definitely exploring something that I would never have explored so much in the past so it's cool to compare the two it's it's fun to see and find little random things from your past but yeah so bringing it back to the alchemist I hope that you guys are doing everything in your power to follow your dreams yeah that's right we're getting inspirational up in here okay guys that is it for this challenge I really do like the way these turned out maybe they're not all kind of Sahara desert type illustrations or backgrounds paintings I don't know what to call them but I really like them and I'm so glad that I did this challenge because it really helped me get out of that kind of art blocky zone and focus on what I enjoy and I really like these top two the best I think these two not so much but yeah that's the end of this episode or challenge and thanks for watching guys please like and subscribe and I'll see you next time bye thank you so much to my patrons for your support they are a Stabilam shot Lucille Tim and Charlotte Jacqueline Alex Noxemba Steph Eva and the Gaia thank you guys so much it means so much to me and I will see you next time