 Hello everybody and welcome back to The Average and holy moly, what happened here? We have blown up...pesto...pesto? Quite a bit because of my last video, so thank you so much if you're a new subscriber and welcome to being an AVERAGER. Yeah, I know it's not that appealing but please stick around. If you're new here, I've done this challenge before a few times so if you like this maybe you'll like those videos, I'll pop a link to more of those up here, possibly, possibly. Here is my book that I am currently reading, I haven't finished reading it yet, but what we do here is the 100 page challenge. So what I have to do is turn to page 100 of my current book and I have to draw a scene or find a prompt within that page. It's a really good way to break out of art block or being stuck on what to draw in a rut or anything like that or just not being able to think what to draw. It's really helpful for prompts and yeah, let's just dive on into it. This book is about a girl who gets stolen and taken to be a courtesan at a palace and it sort of has demons in it who are animals but then also like moon people who are half animal half human and then they have like human people and the humans are downtrodden and it's quite an interesting story, it's, I'm enjoying it, I've just not finished it yet so if it has a really really bad ending, I'm sorry if anyone got recommended it and read it and then was like what are you thinking? Yeah, well I'm enjoying it. It's just a fun story about a dystopian world and it's all set in kind of, it is a fantasy land but it's very heavily inspired by Chinese culture, past culture so it's really cool to have that element within a fantasy dystopian situation. That's right, I said situation and I'm sorry about it. Okay, let's just dive into it and get into page 100. I've read this quite recently so I do have a sort of image of what's on page 100 but not really because I didn't memorise the page when I read it, that makes sense. So let's just get into it. This is actually a really cool scene because this is the first time that the main character Lizzie, I think that's how you say her name, it's like Lizzie so I think it's supposed to be Lizzie. It's the first time that she goes to the palace to meet the king and they've been like dressed up in these costumes that have magic in them so she's wearing this dress that floats, flows like water and she's heading up these really large stairs to meet the king and it says she's stepping out of a golden, it says she's stepping out, the golden spill has painted the ground around the carriages in a shimmering metallic carpet so like all the carpet is gold around them as my feet meet the floor I look down and the ripples flowing out around me so it's pretty cool like imagery there. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, I think I will draw her in her outfit coming out of the carriage but I'll have to have a little a little think first. Okay so it's voice over time and yes, yes everybody I am using the paintbrush that I got with this gouache set because somebody said to me that actually hard brushes are supposed to be for gouache and I didn't know that so I thought wow I judged these paintbrushes too early and I'm going to try and use them and actually they were kind of good so I redact my statement saying that they weren't very good and thank you to that person and probably a few other people who said you're wrong and I accept accept that I was wrong. So I started off by just layering out super basic shapes trying to get the composition down so as you can see I've got the main character Lizzie in the foreground and then have the stairs up to the palace in the background. Now in the book it describes the palace as being just like deep black kind of onyx stone and I thought that's not going to really work so with the style that I want to do so I made it a little bit blue and then red and I tried to replicate the style of a Chinese old fashioned building and I think it kind of worked out okay I try to take a reference but then mix it up and try to change it and make it bigger and seem more like it's this giant palace thing and it turns out okay little spoiler here guys I think I'm not too proud of this artwork I went into it with really big expectations and a lot of pressure so I think that was weighing me down and now I'm yeah I kind of like the finished result but you guys can make up your own minds and you'll probably tell me if you don't like it so that's fine I spent a long time on this background building and figuring out all the details I've never drawn except for maybe the bath house in the spirited away game that I made but that was with paint pens was slightly easier I guess but I've never drawn these sort of rounded curved Chinese style roofs it was hard to get the perspective right and like the right sizing and I think I should have just spent more time on the preliminary sketch and it would have turned out a lot more accurate and less wonky if that's if that's what I can go with here I kept trying to figure out the right colors because obviously in the book it says it's a black castle with made of black stone but in the style of this Chinese building so I kept trying to figure out if I wanted to go dark or just have normal neutral like the greens and reds that we know are quite popular with this kind of style of building or just make it black like in the book but then as I said I kind of went against that and just did the more traditional Chinese building because I felt it just made more sense and I put some areas as darker than what they were in all the reference photos that I was looking at for inspiration so yeah this book is pretty good I'm enjoying it so far it's an easy read I would say it's definitely for a younger audience it is young adult fiction so can't really bash it in that that respect at all it's it's a fun read and it's nothing too heavy or too difficult there are some trigger warnings in there for like abuse and things like that because obviously she does get stolen away from her home to become a quarter son but I think that she's obviously going to rebel in some way and I think this set of books is going to be a trilogy so I think there's going to be more to it in the future they're going to fight back there's also like an LGBT element to it because I think she likes the ladies and I'm really enjoying it I think there's going to be some more magical elements to come within the book as well because as I said you know in the page that I read her dress is made of magic and there's lots of magical elements in the book but we haven't actually seen her do any magic or anything like that yet but I think it's coming it's on its way because the book is called girls made of paper and fire and there's been a lot of hints of like fire within her and stuff like that so I'm like hmm interesting interesting and we'll see how it ends like I said I'm just really enjoying it so far it's just an easy read and if you fancy a sort of is it can it be called a dystopian if it's set in the past it's like a dystopian fantasy with Chinese elements magical elements animals in it who can speak so kind of furries I guess I don't know if that's the right term but yeah it's it's just fun and there's lots of female characters in there which I really like and enjoy reading about because I'm a female so I don't know what I'm saying so getting back to the painting I drew a giant tree in the side of the composition and I think this is my super big regret because I spent like ages on that building and then I just shoved a tree over it and put loads of leaves and then I didn't spend much time on the leaves and I didn't really enjoy how it looked in the end with that so I kind of regret that I think I wanted to have a tree there but a smaller one and then I got carried away with trying to have some kind of a Chinese looking tree with you know the wavy branches and sort of petally leaves and yeah it covered too much but you know sometimes we make mistakes and it happens it's not that big of a deal I can just redo this if I really want to but I don't so it's not that big of a deal then is it I just don't want to take stuff too seriously I guess is what I'm trying to say so I moved on to drawing Lizzie and her dress is obviously in the Chinese style but I hope that it is because I was looking at reference pictures and a lot of like you know traditional Korean dresses were coming up and I was like I've got to be careful here because I don't want to be culturally inaccurate so I hope that this is correct but I guess somebody will let me know if it's not in the book is described as a tight-fitting dress that's wrapped around the middle but it's flowing like water like the magical elements to make it seem like it's flowing like water but it's all silver because something to do with silver in the book if you wear silver it's your in morning so it was kind of like a reflection of them being owned by the king or something like that I can't really remember but I remember that particular comment that it is a silver dress that she's wearing so I go in and I'm just painting her focusing more on her which I think really helped the painting overall because I think it was looking a bit flat when I did all the background but then once I started to focus on her I think it really helped tie everything in and I just wanted to get her down right she also has blazing gold eyes I believe which is supposed to be like oh she's she's got she's super lucky it was a reflection of like she's a lucky person if she has these golden eyes and they're super super rare so that is also another magical element that is yet to come out but it's there it's hidden it's it's underlined in the storyline so something's gonna happen so yeah just doing details around her and making her stand out a little bit more with that silver mica it's actually silver mica ink because I wanted to use my golden silver watercolours the Tamsi ones I think they're called Tamsi they were just too light because they're watercolours so I had to go in with the ink for the silver and then I used the watercolor as the golden carpet because in the page that I read it says there's a wave of magical golden carpet like shining guiding the pathway that she's supposed to walk down so I added that and I'm not like super happy with the way that the gold turned out I think it goes over the top of all the details that I made for the stairs well I didn't really make that many details because I knew I was gonna put that golden carpet down but I think I don't know I think it's a bit too flat but you know I've learnt my lesson now and next time I do something like this I'll know to maybe put more detail onto the carpets itself somehow instead of just having a gold floating thing but yeah this is the ultimate finished product and I hope that you guys like it or enjoyed at least watching the process I'm think I'm about 60% liking it 40% wishing I hadn't made massive mistakes like shoving a massive tree in there and paying more attention to the details of the carpet but you live you learn right and that's my hundred page challenge I hope that you guys enjoyed it if you want to do your own feel free to go ahead and do it I don't mind but I would love to be like showing it because I really love seeing people's results for these kind of things because I just think it's really interesting but yeah that's the end of the challenge and that's the end of the video so thank you for watching and I will see you next time guys bye