 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. I'm Diana Johnson, and today I'm going to do something that I've been doing every day for a year, and that's a daily painting. I'm going to paint an apple. Painting a day is a concept, and it was started by an artist. His name is Dwayne Kaiser, and it was maybe in the 80s. He just was having a difficult time selling paintings. He took a bunch of his paintings that didn't sell and had a party with other artists' friends, and they sort of bought each other's art, and it tended to be smaller pieces of art. So he started then selling smaller pieces of art on eBay, and that's kind of where he started the whole painting a day. The movement has grown to multiple websites featuring just artists who paint daily, and it was something that I decided to challenge myself with. I have painted on and off forever, but I've never really consistently painted. So I decided if I went to college or school for art, one thing I would have to do is paint every day. So that's why I decided to paint daily and challenged myself to do so. I think painting every day is just like doing anything every day, practicing the piano or learning some new craft or art. You just get better. You get better and better and better. I think I was in awe. I would look at other daily painters and see Michael Naples as one that comes to mind. He started just doing pencil drawings, and after painting daily, it seemed like in three, four months, he was producing beautiful works of art, and I thought, gosh, if he can do it, maybe I could do it. But I really didn't think that it would be as profound for me as it was. I learned so much about painting. I mean, I didn't just sit down and continually paint every day. I watched videos and took out books from the library and really educated myself because I would get stuck. You know, how do I mix colors? How do I figure out composition? And then when I started the daily painting, yeah, it was just like I think going to school. I learned a lot. Okay, so what I have done here before I started this was to paint it in gray tones using burnt umber, but just getting the values of the apple because then you can use the color. But if you don't get the values right, then you're just slugging along. So you want the darkest darks first. In other words, if you took a picture of this apple in black and white, then this is a value of that apple. It's just the white and the black in different degrees. So I've painted that first because if you can get that right, then the rest you're just kind of home free. And now I'm going to start applying the colors. And I've also done my colors in value lines, meaning I start with a dark and I keep adding white, which just makes painting go a lot faster because you're not mixing every single color that you see you need. You've got a line of values. They call them strings. So oftentimes painters paint the darkest darks first. You know, the one thing I know is that there's no rules. It feels, it felt like when I started that there were rules I didn't know. There was something I should be doing and I didn't know what it was and I would be making a mess of something, but that's not the case. There's no rules. I probably have watched a hundred, two hundred videos on painting and the one thing I know is that people do what works. And what works for one doesn't work for another and you just try, try until you find something that works. Some painters do the background first. Sometimes they do both. So here's an example of not having to go mix this color because I see it. That color is right there and it's right there. It makes it a lot easier. I never use black either. Well, okay, never, but I hardly ever use black. I tend to mix a black. Mixing the black value versus from the tube produces such a richer black and the black just in and of itself is where an eye tends to stop. It's sort of a dead, lifeless color and so your eye stops there, which is not what you want when you're painting. You want the eye to travel. Go on a little journey. I love painting apples. Get that dark. This is going to make this look like an apple, that little dark bit right there. Without that, it's not going to look as apple-like. Let's get some green with that. Shadows are another thing. It was something that I learned in this whole little journey was shadows. There's so much color in this shadow. You first look at it and you think it's a shadow so it's dark and it's one color. But there's this beautiful lavender in there and there's a beautiful green there. Very little black. That's kind of a dark ultramarine blue. Yeah, let's put that in there. I loved painting, well I still do, but pastel paints because you get to use your fingers a lot. And that's something I like to do. That beautiful purple. Now we're going to work on that background. Lost and found edges. Sounds like a book. If somebody was thinking about painting, I think my motherly advice would be to just do it and not be self-critical to the point that you keep yourself from doing it. You know, criticism is a good thing. It makes us better. But in art sometimes we feel that there's people who just have a natural ability versus somebody who just works really hard at it and makes it look like they have a natural ability. So just paint. That needs to be deader. So if a color is too bright and you want to bring it down a notch, then you want to add its complement, which would be green in this case. Because we're working with red. A little more green here. I think I kind of like that white streak there. I also blogged, did a blog about my painting a day. Because I guess I thought if I didn't, I would probably just at some point maybe become frustrated or feel like I was lacking feedback and maybe quit. So the blogging really helped in that regard. It wasn't until I put it on Facebook that really helped because then people made comments. You know, there's a lot of little steps in this whole process. From taking the picture, printing the picture, painting the picture, and then taking a photograph of the painting and posting it. And then I decided too, an additional challenge was that I would say something that I either liked about the painting or didn't like about the painting or wished I had done differently. So that I would, in my mind, I would be growing or learning as I was painting. So there were a lot of little steps and doing the blog was very helpful because it held me accountable. But putting it on Facebook made all the difference in the world. Because I had people who said every day when I would post something, you know, I like this or it reminds me of something or I like the subject matter. And it just kept me going. It just, I didn't want to let anybody down and not post. So, you know, after eight months, there were times when it was difficult. I just kept going. I got on a step back again. What I wanted ultimately was to have a show, a body of work. I guess because to me that meant I had accomplished something. I had more than just the occasional painting that I had had up until that point. At least I had enough so people could like one of them maybe or dislike some and still like another one. Okay. I think that's it. I like it. People say you paint for yourself but really you don't. I think if you painted for yourself you would never show anyone. You would never hang them up. You would never have an exhibit. You would never, you wouldn't care if anybody saw them. We paint from ourselves. We paint from within ourselves but we don't paint for ourselves.