I Painted a Master Copy of REMBRANDT at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

Welcome back to the studio. I am Sloot, if you didn't know. You could see the painting completed right behind me. But you know, this whole Rembrandt master copy project started a few weekends ago when I went to the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, smack dab in the middle of Central Park on Fifth Avenue. It's one of the most amazing museums of artwork and antiquities in the whole world. You know, it's really on that caliber. People from New England and the Northeast, like myself, are so spoiled to have this in our backyard. When I lived in New York City, I tried to come here at least three times a week. But it's just a magical place. You know, because of COVID, the amount of people they let in is way less. I also went on a Monday, right at noon, and it was as vacant as I've ever seen this museum. It was like I had the museum to myself. And so I was able to kind of sneak around with my bigger cinema camera to get all these wonderful shots of my favorite areas, the Egyptian wing, the Greek and Roman hall, and just some of my favorite paintings. But, you know, I don't think I'll ever be able to film like this again. It was like I was a one-man documentary crew. But it's just epic. It's a magical place. And I usually come here with an agenda to sketch. Obviously, I just wanted to get these shots for the people who don't live in New York City or from outside the U.S. who have never been. I just wanted to give you a quick glimpse at this wonderful, amazing, gigantic museum. I didn't even scratch the surface, but it's such an epic spot. But like I said, you know, when I was living in New York City, I would love to come here and sketch sculptures or sketch paintings. Today, we were sketching some paintings, specifically some Dutch master paintings. And they had a brand new wing because they're doing renovations to some skylights. So they moved some galleries around. So they have this new kind of alcove downstairs with a bunch of Dutch masters, a wide variety of Rembrandt. That's kind of the theme of this video. But other incredible painters like Vermeer. You know, the selection is really wonderful. And it's like the rest of the museum. This whole area was just completely vacant. And I had the whole kind of gallery to myself. And so being in this museum, you just want to absorb everything and take everything in. But I've been so many times. My favorite thing to do is actually sketch. And it's such a great opportunity to really, you know, take some notes with a pencil visually of the amazing paintings that are in this museum. So I take my kind of portable drawing setup, which is just like a wood panel, you know, my portable to-go drawing pencil case. And then I have my GoPro set up to kind of document for these types of videos. But, you know, I was so lucky. This kind of wing had these perfect benches. Again, no one was there. So I just set myself up right in front of some Rembrandts. And I got to work. This first painting, Hendrik Stoffels by Rembrandt, just this woman. I'm no art historian, by the way, and I'm an enthusiast and a practitioner, but I don't know much about these things. But, you know, I just decided to do this. And I apologize in advance for this quality. The lighting in this alcove was pretty bad. I mean, they have spotlights on the actual paintings, but it's very low light. And then obviously you could see these intense shadows. For drawing, it was not only terrible for this GoPro shot, but for me in general, working around my own shadow, it was kind of a bother. But just a solid hour sketch. And just a few feet away, honestly, is this other Rembrandt entitled Bellona. And I just love the armor. I love the face, the pudgy kind of face. And I wanted to paint this actually, but it was way too big and even sketching the shield and everything, it would have taken too long. So I just decided to kind of do a portrait like the last one, just quick, simple sketches to get the idea and concept out. The helmet was so awesome. This, again, was probably about an hour sketch. Just a wonderful time. It's like my favorite thing to do, sketching at these museums. It's quite enjoyable. And I did actually run out of time. I wanted to do another sketch, but it was closing. So I kind of picked my final Rembrandt painting, because I was in the Rembrandt theme, the Rembrandt mood, to bring back to the studio and paint. And I decided to go with this wonderful portrait of a male entitled Man with a Magnifying Glass. And it's just an epic painting. I really love the style, the paint application on its face. It was just so epic to me. I mean, all of these paintings are kind of jaw-dropping in person, but this is the one I picked, and I was very excited to bring it back to the studio. Now, all we have to do is prep the surface I'm gonna be painting on. Whoa! Illustration board. Gesso water. Water it down just a little. Before we actually start this painting, I wanna talk about this amazing artist resource online. He goes by the name of Steven Bauman, one of the top tier teachers of everything academic, traditional drawing and painting. He's a really amazing artist. And serendipitously, him and Ken Gauchan, another artist on Instagram, just amazing artists. They're doing this whole Rembrandt contest of sketching Rembrandt, and they did this whole podcast on Rembrandt. And it just happened to be right smack dab in the middle of my mini Rembrandt project, happened just coincidentally. So I thought that was awesome. You could go check them out. I'll link them in the description. Immense, vast knowledge on painting, and more specific, the style of painting Rembrandt is. So I'll try to talk about it as we're painting, but they are the real deal knowledge resource. And so we begin. And in this beginning, I'm kind of talking, actually, throughout this whole first section, I'm talking to my patrons. I paint live, so that's what I'm kind of doing. In this beginning, I'm walking them through the kind of first stage of outlining the generic proportion. So if you want to check out Patreon, link in the description. I paint live every week, and I love to share these projects with my little community over at Patreon before YouTube, so check that out. But this is very, very simple block and stage. You know, I'm using straight lines, and I'm really just looking for the proportion and the major shapes. It's all very simple. It actually looks a little goofy and silly, but these are hopefully the correct destinations of the pupils, of the nose, like the shadow shape of the nose. You know, the forehead, the eyebrows, and the shoulders and everything like that. Just an extremely simple rubric to then begin placing value and color and things like that. And I'm using the Zorn palette, as people are familiar, if you watch my videos, it's a pretty traditional palette. It's very simple. Yellow, ochre, cadmium red are really the only colors, and we got titanium white and ivory black. I'm using these two kind of thicker filberts and flatheads, and I don't use many brushes, but I'm trying to stay loose in the beginning. And I'm filming this on the big camera just for actually the Patreons for the live stream. I'm telling them how. You know, the Zorn palette is so powerful, but you know, pretty much every color mixture, except for a few, are gonna have a combination of all four colors. So I was just kind of talking about that. You know, if you want to learn about the Zorn palette, I have other videos on my YouTube channel talking about it. And I do cheat, actually. I use some alizarin crimson and maybe another color throughout. But this is like the base palette, rocking and rolling. So I'm just putting in these shadows. That's how I usually like to begin it. A lot of painters do that. We work in from dark to light. And I have a lot of issues with this painting. I'll just tell you now, I think it came out really successful. I'm very happy with it. And I always like, during these longer monologues of voiceovers, I do critique myself very much because I think it's important. And I am hard on myself because that's how I like to improve. And there's not many other people looking at my work telling me what's right, what I did successful, what I did unsuccessful. So for the people thinking I'm going too hard on myself, I am certainly not. I give praise where praise is due for myself and pat myself on the back, but certainly have to point out the things that I did not so successfully that could have been better going in next time. And actually that's what you want to do. That's the information you want to dig up, this visual archeology, so that you can improve the next time. So I nail the colors I think, and I nail the resemblance of this man, man with the magnifying glass. But I generally am going too light with the values. And you'll see once I start adding in the lighter proportions or the lighter values and the skin tones, I start off with a kind of too bright value and that kind of ruins me for the rest of the painting. So this right here, this is like one of the brighter spots of the forehead that I wanted to block in. And from the jump, this value was too bright. And then it affects kind of, it affects the rest of my colors and value structure. So I think you'll see at the end my resemblance and the relationship between the shadows and the light is good. It's just overall too bright. So if I just stopped down one value or one stop darker, unanimously throughout the face, I think it would have been a lot more successful, but that's fine. It's very nuanced and the half tones are too bright. And it's just a lot of things. And this nomenclature I'm using is just very oil painting, painting theory. If you don't know what I'm saying, that's okay. That's what I'm just talking about and the things going through my mind. But we're just blocking in right now. You could see those more warm and actually very saturated colors on the palette. A lot of orange in this shadow side. And there's actually a lot of color. That's the other thing I didn't do super successful. There's actually so much pink and red in the cheek and forehead area. And I do get more pink and red as time goes throughout this painting, but I was too timid to go too colorful. But that is okay. And painting, it's so awesome to record it like I am here to look back because only kind of looking back at the time lapse and watching myself paint, do I realize the things I do successful and unsuccessful? So it's a very weird, but also amazing kind of perspective to get. And like I said, there's not a lot of people giving me critique. So I have to put it upon myself to really analyze unemotionally, just very subjectively to see what I'm doing. But I'm very happy with the painting. It was just so fun. And the whole, Rembrandt, especially in his later days, Steven Bauman talks about this in his podcast, how Rembrandt gets very loose with his paint strokes and the transition maybe of the features like the nose. And he just leaves things very simplified, but also it represents so much. And so I'm clearly not on Rembrandt's level. Also, this painting was, it was maybe seven hours total. I did two different painting sessions. The paint was wet the entire time. So it sort of was ala prima, which means wet on wet, but I certainly didn't work in drying layers at all. This was kind of a one-stop shop, a seven hour painting sketch, but I developed it pretty well. And it's obviously, let's be honest here, obviously not close to the refinement and the masterful strokes as Rembrandt, nor as any of my other paintings, but my agenda was to stay loose and this loose kind of paint application, also being liberal with the paint, putting a lot of paint down and just really kind of mashing it all around. It's hard. I mean, if you see the reference photo in the light by the left cheekbone and the forehead, there's this amazing amount of textural paint. And Rembrandt really shocked people with his paint application and how much paint he used, the texture and effects that that gave. I'm just noodling around trying to use a bunch of paint, but right here, I do a little red, but I could have gone way more and that's fine. But actually something that we could talk about that Steven Bauman always does on his Instagram, again, to bring him up, is he kind of color corrects the paintings because some of the paintings you'll see in person at the Met or that are professionally photographed, they're very warm and over the years, tobacco and smoke and other tars, and just things in the air, get onto the painting and dull it out and make it very warm and yellowish. And so what Steven does, he kind of color corrects them in Photoshop to make them a bit cooler, to make them a bit more lifelike. And that's what I did going into this. I planned on making the highlights a bit cooler and the overall color temperature of the painting is very yellow when you look it up online. So I kind of brought that back, made it cooler. So I'm happy I did that, but again, it's just a little too bright. And honestly, when you are trying to paint very light skin, pale skin with a lot of light in it, it's very difficult because it can become very chalky, very fast. So I struggled with that. Again, I still think I did a great job. I'm very happy with it. We're putting the last little doodads of his necklace and the very kind of mushed and represented kind of armor and cloth he's wearing. But it was such a blast. I know I just ranted so hard. I can't believe 10 minutes has just ended, but I just wanted to say a bunch of things like that. And let me know what you think. I could always use tips. If anyone wants to give me some critique, I would be more than happy to take it. And yeah, this was just such a blast. I just had so much fun. Certainly learned a lot. And it's just another project in the books, sitting down for a bunch of good hours, painting, observing, trying to work through this puzzle. So I really hope you did take something away from this video. If you enjoyed it, smash the like button, right? It helps out the algorithm. I love making these videos. I love painting, but I also love sharing, making it entertaining, walking you through. Going to the Met is like my favorite thing to do ever. And then the opportunity to film there and then film this video. Also other artists who are so amazing on social media are doing similar things with Rembrandt. I just feel interconnected. I feel some continuity within the art world. That's how I feel. Let me know what you think. Get out there, do some master copies. It's quite enjoyable and fun and you learn. So all of that. See you in the next video.