Pirogh Hesse

I discovered this week the amazing book Crosshatching in Pen & Ink by August Lamm and I decided to study cross-hatching. Here is my fist drawings, a pomegranate and my left hand:

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Hatching with a fineliner-pen, 21x30cm.

My wife recovered and restored an old safe in bad condition. After painting and cleaning, it looked better. I painted some acrylic flowers in the decorative style of Alsatian furniture.

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Acrylic, 80x50x40cm.

To mix my acrylic colors as I want, I must have a basic and well balanced set of pigments, and I must know what will happen when I mix them together. So, during a long weekend, I decided to paint a color-chart for better understanding and mastering colors. I first defined my palette with twelve colors:

name	pigment	winsor-newton
magenta quinacridone	PR122	550
red cadium	PR108	99
sienne brunt	PR101	74
Umber raw	PBr7	557
Ocre	PY43	744
yellow cadium medium	PY35	116
yellow Hansa	PY3	346
green phthalo	PG36	521
blue cerulean	PB35	137
blue phthalo	PB15:3	515
blue ultramarine	PB29	664

In the second column, I indicated the official pigment symbol. The number in the last column is the index in the Winsor Newton acrylic catalog. I then started my first color-chart: I followed the book Alla prima by Richard Schmid, page 130. Note that this book is now feely available for downloading

In each column of the color-chart, I first used each color as it came from the rube, and then lightened by adding some titanium white. I first observed that there was redundancies in my first palette: the cerulean blue is very close to the …

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I continued to paint some portrait from a photography reference. I turned to Josephine Baker, using a photography due to Henri Manuel in the 1920s.

Acrylic, monochrome sepia, 50x65cm.

I started to study charcoal portraits with the head of the Aphrodite of Cnide , known as head Kaufmann:

I observed the original sculpture in the Louvre museum in Paris and then worked with charcoals from a reference photography. I then turned to morphology, with the Écorché de Houdon, which is conserved at Villa Médicis, in the French academy in Rome. I founded references in volume 15 of the excellent encyclopedia Peindre et dessiner edited by Larousse in 1995: it just got an used version of the complete collection, with 120 volumes and 30 videos for 50 euros. Finally, I got a a 3D printing of it in resin of about 40cm high. Here is the result:

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I used sanguine and some color pastel pencils. I then switched to the Vénus de Milo, that I also observed in the Louvre museum in Paris. Finally, I drew the David by Micheangelo which is exposed in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence while a copy is still in the street, in front of the palazzo Vecchio. I founded a free 3D computer's model of it in the amazing wikimedia project.

Charcoal and pastel, about 65x50cm.