Here is my progress on my painting "Belly Dancer". I took the photo at a party my mom and I attended with a friend of ours.

I show you the pastel drawings I did here and demonstrate a layering principle I learned.

I made a video demonstrating painting skin tone in acrylics.

My last video for this week is questioning whether or not I'm really teaching people to paint.

Next week I'll have a video about charcoal, a slower version of "Speed Painting Woman With Head Jewels", and other things.

Only we can give life to our dreams. More coming up.

​There’s a speech I’ve been thinking a lot about. It’s from Les Brown. I’m gonna read it to you, word for word, and then I’m going to give my commentary on it.

​“Imagine if you will be on your death bed – and standing around your bed – the ghosts of the ideas, the dreams, the abilities, the talents given to you by life.

​And that you for whatever reason, you never acted on those ideas, you never pursued that dream, you never used those talents, we never saw your leadership, you never used your voice, you never wrote that book.

​And there they are standing around your bed looking at you with large angry eyes saying ‘we came to you, and only you could have given us life! Now we must die with you forever.’

​The question is – if you die today, what ideas, what dreams, what abilities, what talents, what gifts, would die with you?”

​So those are Mr.Brown’s words. Now for my thoughts. The part of this speech that stands out the most for me, the part that keeps replaying in my mind over and over is, what I said to open this video, which is that, only we can give life to our dreams. That’s a pretty serious thing to think about. If a thought, idea, desire, whatever has come to us, no one else, not our parents, not our spouse, not our best friend, can breathe life into it. Only we can. We will need help to be successful, but no one can bring our dreams to life for us. After all, they came to us, not them.

​The other thing that I got from this speech is that the thoughts and ideas that we just can’t get rid of, maybe that’s life telling us something. If you can’t stop thinking about opening a school, then maybe you don’t just want to open a school, maybe you’re supposed to open a school.

​I talked about this in my video “Caring About My Work” and that’s that every piece of artwork starts as a dream inside of me. Now every time I get a canvas or a piece of paper out and start putting stuff on it, I’m giving life to that dream. You could also say I’m giving life to dreams when I make these videos.

​So those are my thoughts on Les Brown’s speech. I’m going to link to a video where you can hear him saying it. I’m sure his voice will hit you a lot harder than mine. If you have any thoughts on Mr.Brown’s speech on the topic of pursuing dreams in general, please share them in the comments.