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?

Remember the brightest winter of your childhood, and maybe not one. There is no way you ate icicles, sledding down the hill, lost in the snow boots and licked the metal swing remember you do not need. Let us turn to what you have observed, noticed and what was surprising when changing the quality of lighting. Snow, sky and trees looked very different: during the day, on a Sunny day; in the evening, at dusk, and in the dark

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).

   Often this question is asked by our "recruits" and just fans of creativity in social networks and in person. The question is certainly important and interesting, but not easy. As in any other activity, the fine arts have their own rules, laws, traditions and wishes. You don't ask, for example, a bricklayer, how to build houses or a Baker, how to bake bread, right? Because in their activity there are many nuances. The artist has no less of them.