Probably every beginner artist asks himself this question and diligently and persistently looking for an answer to it. It's not so simple and simple, as the path from a novice artist to a professional or at least to an amateur artist is long and very individual. Here, for example, I. E. Repin, too, was once a novice self-taught artist.

Often self-taught artists or beginning portrait painters ask the same question: how to paint a portrait of a person? What paint to take for a portrait? How to get body color? As a rule, the drawing itself can be done somehow, some even draw their own features, stretch their facial features, but with the color everything becomes completely incomprehensible. So what to do?

Choosing a canvas for painting is a very pleasant experience. Now on sale there is everything that only the soul wishes. You can choose not only canvas of any size and grain (coarse-grained, medium, smooth), composition (flax, cotton, mixed linen, synthetics) and even configurations (rectangular standard, panoramic,

   One of my teachers of classical academic drawing and painting, when the work on the production came to a standstill, came up, made a characteristic click with his fingers and said: “There is something missing. We have to make a ding-ding! ".

One day, I happened to hear a conversation between my brother and a friend, very peculiar, between us:

- Which do you like more cats?

- I'm smoky-blue

- Well, Yes, they're beautiful. And for some reason I like simple, gray, are striped, yard.

- Yeah, they can be a little green.

- Right, yeah, that's what I like.

One day, in painting, during my studies, being in the first year, I painted another still life from nature with oil paints. Of course, by that time, we - the students have already studied the course of painting technology, learned the table of mixing paints and their light resistance, learned to prepare themselves “tee” (a composition of three components: varnish, thinner, oil for correct dilution of oil paints to a liquid state) and strictly, consistently dried paint layers before starting another painting session. But, mistakes happen at all. In order to save the diluent (for some reason, pinene was less than required), I added to the “tee” more varnish and even more oil. We, students, used, basically, the settled and bleached sunflower oil, instead of linen which at the end of the nineties - the beginning of two thousandth years still was difficult to get in the small provincial town in the North of Sverdlovsk region (Russia).

Why do you need to draw simple geometric shapes: cube, ball, cylinder, cone, hexagon? As in any activity, it all starts with the simplest, as any progressive development consists of the gradual development of the material from the simple to the complex.