Manual de pintura y caligrafía

H., a commissioned painter, agrees to paint a portrait of S., manager of a powerful company. Painfully aware of his limitations as an artist, of the mediocrity of his canvases and the banality of the life he leads, he begins to question the meaning of his own existence, his personal relationships and his aesthetic weaknesses. As a result of this reflection, H. secretly begins to make, in the privacy of his workshop, a second portrait of S. -less conventional and, therefore, more real-, at the same time that he decides to write a diary that helps him to get to know yourself better. This process of self-discovery, which symbolically concludes with the fall of fascist power in Portugal and the beginning of the Carnation Revolution, leads the protagonist to consider new life goals, to discover true love and, as a consequence of all this, to achieve his long-awaited freedom as an artist and as a person.