Rembrandt Knew Something We Didn’t – His Palette Explained

This is my favorite palette for mixing skin tones with oil paint. It's a Rembrandt inspired palette, meaning it's not entirely historical. We're working off of principles here. It's more conceptual. It's based off his love of earth colors, and we do use some modern substitutions when necessary. I have found it to be an absolutely brilliant palette for painting skin tones. It makes painting flesh so much easier. So for context, the upcoming video that you're about to watch is from my Learning from the Masters Rembrandt course. It's an excerpt. You don't need the course to understand the video that's coming up. It's pretty self-contained. But there are things that I talk about, about previous lessons, this and that, that wouldn't make sense unless I brought this up beforehand. So I just wanted to bring that up here. So speaking of substitutions, we are using a titanium chalk oil-based paint here. He obviously used lead. I tend to use lead a lot in my own painting, but it was the only paint that had the very specific consistency that we were trying to get to emulate, you know, this Rembrandt here. And I don't always do this because I don't always need that super ropey, crazy consistency of paint, and I don't always add the Velasquez medium to the other paints like I do here. So I don't want that to cause any confusion. You don't need to add all that stuff and make your paint super ropey and consistent like that. It's only specifically for the context of the course. I use this palette all the time for teaching my own classes and teaching students how to paint flesh, and I'm not always adding the Velasquez medium in there to make it sticky like that. Also, don't worry about any of specific brand names I'm using here. Some of them are kind of more expensive paints. You can use whatever you find. Particularly earth colors, even like the student grade, are pretty close. They're pretty good. So don't worry too much about the expensive paints that I'm using. I only stated specific brand names so students could follow along exactly with the exact same things if they wanted to. So you don't have to worry about that just for the general use of this palette here. If you are interested in my learning from the masters Rembrandt course, it is linked in the description. That's where this video comes from, but you don't need, like I said, you don't need any of the prior knowledge to understand what's coming up, so let's get into the video. All right, here we go. Talking about the palette we're using here. It's an Inspired by Rembrandt palette. I've looked into, kind of researched from a number of different sources what the chemical analysis and what the layer analysis has basically shown that Rembrandt used a lot of iron oxides or what can also be called earth colors. So these are like the traditionally the siennas, the ochres, and the umbers. They're all iron oxide based. You can basically get the entire spectrum of colors from like from the iron oxides. There's even like a blue ochre, and there's a, you know, there's a more purplish, purplish kind of a caput mortum ochre or iron oxide colors, and there's probably some iron oxide green as well. I don't know about the green. I know there's terra vert, but it's not an iron oxide, but it is sort of, it's kind of like an earth color, but for our purposes we're just going to think of iron oxides because that's what they're commonly referred to as. So a yellow ochre, brown ochre, burnt sienna, raw sienna, raw umber, and burnt umber. So let's lay out the palette here, and we will break down how we're going to do this because the problem with like if we're really trying to like, I don't know, get a close approximation of Rembrandt's palette, something we can never really fully do because all they can do when they're looking through the microscope or analyzing it, analyzing the chemical structure of the paint layers, they can see that it's iron oxide often. They can see if it's like red iron oxide or yellow iron oxide, or if it's high in manganese, and it's giving more of an umber, but they can't tell you exactly what name it is. You know, they're not going to be able to say it's like cypress yellow ochre from this quarry or whatever, and even if they were able to tell us that, it would be pointless to us anyway because we wouldn't be getting, even if there is a cypress quarry that's still operating, we wouldn't have any idea if we're getting the exact same yellow ochre like vein or whatever that's coming out of the ground. So trying to approximate or trying to copy his palette exactly is never going to happen. So what we're going to do is try to approximate it here, and I'm going to show you I think a pretty neat way of approximating it with just a few colors. It keeps it nice and simple and makes it easy for us to add additives to our paint without having to fuss around with too many different paints and whatnot. It happens to be really, you know, he called the earth colors the friendly colors, and they happen to be like the easiest, I think the easiest palette for painting flesh because they're like already ready-made flesh colors. It's like a pastel, they're like pastels basically. They're like flesh color pastels, and they're just ready for us, ready-made, and you basically can't spike chroma outside of normal flesh tone with these really. So let's get set up. All right, at the center of my palette I like to have my white, and this is Velasquez medium from Rubliv. I just have it in one of these. I buy it by the jar and tube it up in these bigger tubes because they don't have the bigger tubes of it, but it's basically a white paint that has no color. So it's a calcite, and it is bound in oil, so there are pigment particles in it where traditional oil mediums, this is why it's not really, I don't really like calling this a medium so much. It's more like a paint because like a traditional medium, like an Alken medium or Ralph Meyers medium, which is like a, you know, turp and stand oil and varnish, they don't have any pigment particles in them like a paint does. So they're what we call like very fat, so they have a lot of oil content, and that gets very complicated when we have different drying rates for those, because originally what fat over lean meant was that the more oil in the pigment to oil ratio that was there, the slower drying it's going to be, and the less oil, more pigment, faster drying it's going to be. So it was really, it was really more about drying time, and the complication comes when all of a sudden we have these fatty mediums that we're adding that should be slowing the drying, but instead they're speeding the drying, so it creates a lot of complication in the layers. But anyway, what we're trying to do here is we're mixing about 80 to 90 percent of the Velasquez medium or the chalk paint. It's probably what, probably what it's most appropriately called, and if you've got my like red, lead, white replacement recipe video, then you probably know all about it. What we're looking for is like a really sticky, thick paint, and there's no way to get a sticky, thick paint without grinding it ourselves or doing it this way. I'm just putting a little bit of, oh this is a Old Holland titanium white, it's fine. I like that or like the Rembrandt titanium white that's bound in linseed oil, and we're going to mix this one up. You really want a ton of this, like this isn't enough right here. I'm going to mix more. I really want to hammer home how much paint we need, and this ain't it, because we're painting so thick that we just need a very, very full palette, and I just got stingy because it's like kind of near the end of the, end of the thing here, so I just want to show you how much you really, you really want a super loaded palette. I guess I'll put a little bit of the Rembrandt titanium white this time. Mixing titanium whites. It doesn't really mean anything. I could probably even have more than this, honestly. Alright, putting out the Mars red light, and this is our approximation for, this is a synthetic iron oxide red. The reason we're using synthetics is because we're adding quite a bit of the calcite paint, the Velasquez medium, which makes it more transparent and also makes it weaker tinting strength, so we're kind of like offsetting that a little bit by having the stronger version of the, of the earth pigment, so instead of like red ochre and like natural red ochre, which is kind of like a not quite as strong a tinting color, we're kind of making up for that. Then we have Mars yellow. A lot of yellow ochres that you buy will be Mars yellow or synthetic iron oxide, synthetic yellow iron oxide. PY42 is the pigment number for the, for the synthetic yellow ochre, basically. A lot of them are called yellow ochre, even though they're not. They're just like, they're, it's kind of like, it's basically a hue, but it is the same elemental properties, so it's really not that, it's not like a, like a bad kind of, like a full substitute kind of hue, or like they substitute cadmium yellow for like haloncy yellow or something. And the synthetic red iron oxide is PR101. I think the, the, the natural one is PR102. And with the, with this one, it is, the natural one is PY43. So the first one is synthetic for some reason. The first number in the sequence and the second number is the, the natural, which is kind of weird. I think the natural would come first. Then we have raw sienna, which is really great. It's a really good intermediate kind of darkish yellow brown. That's a good meeting place between the yellow ochre and the, we'll call it yellow ochre, even though it's more just yellow, and the raw sienna, which we're using old holland raw sienna or raw umber for some reason. I remember I just had on a whim decided I wanted to use this. Putting this out. This is ivory black. This is old holland. I just got it. It was like on sale at the art store. I had a bunch of oil leaking all around it. That's why the paper towels all around it. I mean, this, the Michael Harding raw umber is totally fine too. All right. Putting out the Van Dyke brown, Michael Harding. All right. Finally, the color that we have is transparent oxide brown. Our main reason for this is to add to our black, to make it better at drying. Cause ivory black is terrible at drying. And it also makes it more transparent, which is sort of if you ever heard people say that, you know, like ivory black, it's very flat. That's the reason they don't like it. The reason is because the reason it has that appearance is because it's very opaque. Well, it's, it's pretty opaque. You know, it's not quite as opaque as Mars black, which is super opaque, but that opacity kind of comes forward in the picture plan where transparency tends to recede because it creates a lot of like micro texture and possibly even like a perception through the, the micro thin layer to create this kind of atmospheric effect where if it's just purely opaque, it comes totally forward, sits right on the surface of the, of the picture plane and doesn't look as good. So that's, that's the problem. And that's what solves the issue. It's really pretty simple. Find this a little easier. You can just modify the black. So you can, you can add like, you know, quinacridone red to the black and any of the transparent oxides to the black. It'll all dry pretty fast and they warm it up because it tends that like pure black is almost too cool for most accents. So they need like a warmth to them. And so that's perfect for adding, you know, like a transparent colors because transparent warm colors, because it, it warms them up. All right. And actually, no, this is the final color I was missing. This is quinacridone rose. I like this color a lot. It's, we'll talk about it in a second. Let's, let's talk about the meat and potatoes of this palette. So I'm going to put Velasquez medium about, it's somewhere around like 40%, 40% just eyeballing it, 40% just to these colors and the white. We want the, the super sticky ropey, crazy quality that the Velasquez, the chalk paint addition does only in like the lighter lights. We don't need it in the red because it's so strong that, but just a small amount of red will tint very strongly. So it's just really not that important. As we get down into like the darker colors, we'll want to add like a little bit of a stand oil, which is going to help alleviate the, the sinking in that'll happen that eventually happens. The stickiness of the stand oil literally is like working together with the pigment to hold each other in place. So it doesn't literally doesn't sink into the substrate. All right. So we're just going to take our jar of stand oil. Just get like a, about a third of your knife. Not even that much. Maybe just like the tip of the knife. It's some good, maybe it could have been maybe a little bit more of that. Cause there's a good amount of paint, but it's okay. There, there will inevitably, inevitably, inevitably be sinking in when we're working in layers. So we got to deal with, we got to oil out a little bit, but we want to oil out as little as possible. We're not going to paint over that section so we can avoid a lot of it by adding the sticky stand oil or we'll fast forward here, get these all mixed in. All right. So we have our stand oil and our dark colors, and we're going to mix up our Velasquez medium into our lighter colors. Really both of these, all of these are kind of stand oil, um, focus because the Velasquez medium has a stand oil, which is also called bodied oil. All right. So now that we have all of our additives kind of, uh, squared away, but you can see it is a little bit, it is a little bit, uh, tedious, um, to add down. You get used to it after a while, but it makes such a huge difference that it ends up being worth it. But, uh, also it's part of the reason why I like to stay with like a more limited palette because I do like to modify the paints and the more paint we have, the more of the modifying we have to do. And it's just like a bigger barrier before we get into painting, uh, each day. Let's talk about this a little bit more in more depth. What we have here is our red earth, basically. And in the literature, we see red ochre a lot, which is sort of a generic name for an iron oxide that is high in hematite. Um, hematite, you can think of like blood, hema. It's sort of the, the red version of iron oxide with the, uh, with the, uh, yellow ochre, um, or the Mars red that we're using here, uh, the iron oxide, uh, variety or version that we see in there is, uh, limonite, limonite. So, uh, uh, you can think of obviously, you know, lemon, lemon, very, uh, very yellow. So we have our yellow and our red, um, those show up a lot. They also have, uh, they can, they can sense manganese. Uh, so manganese are umbers, uh, burnt umber and raw umber are very high in manganese. Manganese is basically like a black pigment by itself. Um, but it has like, our umbers have a little bit of adulterants. They have some of the limonite, some of the hematite. So, uh, actually, no, let's talk to the sienna. So with the siennas, uh, what we have is sort of, they're sort of like a stepchild of all of them. So they have, uh, they tend to have manganese. They tend to have some of the hematite and they have some of the limonite. So if we mix these together, like say the burnt, we want to make a burnt sienna. We mix some of the, uh, van dyke Brown here, which is high manganese, which is basically, it is actually as a manganese Brown. And we mix it together. We have ourselves basically a very nice kind of burnt sienna color. The one, uh, the one thing that is a little bit different is that, uh, the siennas in particular, the burnt sienna and raw sienna tend to be a little more transparent. Uh, the only reason for that is they're a little more adulterant in the, in the soil. So it has a little more, uh, like aluminum or silica or calcite like we're adding here that makes it more transparent. And then as we get kind of, uh, further down into the darkness here, as we get down like closer to the dark of the van dyke Brown, we start to get something that's closer to burnt umber. So now we have basically all of our, all of our like kind of red, reddish umbers here all the way up to like red ochre. And, uh, just to know like red ochre, Venetian red, terracotta, um, English red, Terra Rosa. Uh, those are all basically the same thing. They're just called different things. Uh, they tend to be, they, they have, there's a wide variety of how like red or yellow or dark, or they can do a lot with that, that PR 101. Uh, but for the most part, all those brick color, like brick red colors, bricks are literally colored with red iron oxide. You know, the red iron oxide or the hematite is, uh, is basically like a, we can think of it as like a dehydrated iron oxide. So it's iron oxide that has basically rusted in the, it's oxidized in the presence of very little water. So we see a lot of like red iron oxide, uh, dirt and rocks in very, uh, dry environments like deserts. You see like red rock deserts, things like that. Uh, the opposite is true with, uh, this is, we, uh, this is actually called hydrated iron oxide. And this is basically oxidized in the presence of, uh, a good deal of, H2O in both the atmosphere and possibly in touch with it. So you can think of this of like the yellow river in China is very yellow, uh, very yellow mud, very yellow. So if you've ever been to like a river lake, seeing the dirt there, it is, it is quite a bit more yellow. Uh, you rarely see like very red, um, red dirt, uh, around like a sort of inland, uh, waterways. And that's, that's probably, it's not the only, it's, I'm not a geologist. It's probably not the only colorant that's causing that, but it's a big one. Uh, what's interesting is when you, uh, when you roast these pigments at a high degree at a high temperature, the yellow ochre, the, uh, lemonade transforms into hematite and that's how you get, well, not, I guess with the yellow ochre, what happens with you? I don't, there, there is like a burnt yellow ochre and it basically becomes like a, a pretty opaque, like a raw Sienna, but, uh, the, the more common, uh, ones that we have, like, uh, uh, we have like raw Sienna. If we, uh, cook this at a high temperature, uh, all the lemonade will transform into hematite and it will become, uh, burnt Sienna, burnt Sienna. Uh, so raw Sienna, burnt Sienna, uh, becomes more red. When you cook it, it becomes more red. It becomes dehydrated. Same thing happens with the raw umber, which is a yellowish brown here. If we, uh, if they're, you know, before it's mixed with oil, obviously, uh, the, the dry pigment particles are roasted, uh, turns into burnt umber, uh, becomes more red, um, transforms the lemonade into hematite. So kind of interesting. It's kind of cool just to know all the kind of anatomy of the iron oxide so that we can just have a better understanding. We can design our palettes a little bit better and just have more control over our paint, not just be at the whims of sort of what one person or another person told us about this or that paint. Uh, the one kind of standout color, uh, on the palette here is the Quinacridone Rose. What we're doing is, uh, this is a substitution, like a lot of these, a synthetic substitution for the traditional, uh, Rose Matter, uh, which is, I believe it's, it's the, the same plant that they create Alizarin Crimson out of, just they end up creating two different, uh, one is cooler, one is warmer, but I like this one because it steers more towards blue. So it give us, gives us a little bit of a spike into the blue, uh, family. We can always get it a little more red with, uh, turn it into like a more true red either by adding some Yellow Ochre. This ends up being like a pretty kind of salmon-y red. It's a lower chroma red than you would get like a straight Cadmium because we're basically mixing a primary here, which you can do. It's possible to mix a primary, it'll just be a lower chroma version of the primary. So we have like a nice kind of like, uh, kind of like salmon-y pink here and we could probably make it even more, more red. So it's like a really nice, uh, nice reddish color. And what's great about that is like this color absolutely belongs in flesh. Like if we did this with straight Cadmium Red, that color doesn't really belong in flesh, it's too, too bright. So it's, uh, helping, it's like governors, you know, there's governors on the exteriors of the, of the color palette here, keeping us from spiking out into super high chroma and getting like a funky cartoony look. And, uh, the primary red that we'll be using here is the, uh, the Red Ochre or Mars Red we have there and, uh, Quin, Quinacridone Rose, which makes a really beautiful red. And this is inspired directly from Rembrandt, which they saw that most of his red, instead of using, uh, Vermilion, Mercuric Sulfide, which is, which is expensive back then and expensive today. Uh, instead of doing that, he would mix his, uh, Red Lake with his, uh, Red Ochre and would make a really nice red. This is like my favorite red ever because, uh, again, it won't spike too far outside of the possibility of flesh color. So when we mix some white into it, it's like a really, really nice, nice, clean red. That's not too crazy. It's not too, uh, too sharp and crazy. So we have our reds on this side. Then we have our, um, kind of yellow or yellow dirt string here. And they're basically two value strings without any white. Um, they're just with the, uh, the natural value of the color itself. And we have like a really good sort of, now we have this sort of these value choices that we can work with, uh, especially in like the lower half of the value scale. And as we kind of move upward, we want to get a little bit higher chroma. We want our kind of cleaner color. Uh, if you're used to working with like a, a chromatic palette and, um, graying everything down with, with complimentary colors, it may take a little bit to get used to this because you, you always have the tendency to want to, uh, uh, lower the chroma with the opposite. In this case, we don't really need to do that that much. The only way, the way that we lower the chroma is by adding gray. And usually like with a fleshy naturalistic, um, color palette that lowering of the chroma happens with, uh, Romber, at least in this palette case, like Romber is really good at lowering the chroma. It never gets too like cold. So again, it never like spikes too far away. Like sometimes black, pure black plus white can spike too far towards blue, which we would basically never see. And, uh, despite what the impression I say, like outside, you will see blue and in the shadows, but inside there's no blue and shadows. Then we have our kind of yellow string. And this is like, this is pretty informal. I don't really do a ton of like crazy, uh, pre-mixing, but I just want to have a good sort of logic here and plenty of paint so I can really scoop that paint up. Like, like a grave digger, you know, just like scoop it up with the, with the brush. Even if I'm just dabbing on there, the paint is so thick on the palette that a lot will paint will come out. If it's like thin on the palette, you really have to like shovel it off of there. And it's, it's not quite as easy when you have these like thicker piles. You can really get a lot of paint on your painting. It's something like, as I was saying, if you want a lot of paint in your painting, you need a lot of paint on your palette. All right. So in practice, uh, I tend to mix more with the, with the, the brush instead of the palette knife, but I do sometimes, uh, except for at the very beginning, I use a palette knife to mix it up, mix up some of the strings and some of the logic here. But we can see we have our value string of red on the, on the left side, yellow on the right side, going all the way down to our gray. So it's not, it's not perfectly perfect. It'd be nice if like the yellow came all the way down here, but since our dark yellow is our main neutralizer, we're using our neutralizing string that kind of, uh, travels upward. So, uh, as we're looking at the portrait that we're painting, uh, as we're in the lights, we want all of our mixtures to be in the lights up here. And as we're in the darks, we want them all to be down here. And we're looking for variations between red and yellow in the flesh. All flesh is some form of like sort of an orange hue. And we see in Rembrandt, he really likes to spike the cleaner reds and the cleaner yellows, uh, kind of, uh, that are kind of couched in these kind of grayer peacher, um, overall tones. So this gives us the flexibility to kind of not over mix. So we can like take some yellow, say we're thinking that's a little too red. We can take a little bit of yellow, make a little thing over here and make a little bit more of like a peachy, a peachy, very fleshy, traditional fleshy, nude color. As we get like higher in the higher chroma notes, maybe we want it to less pink, more yellow, or more orange. So we add a little bit of yellow here. So we have some flexibility to be mixing into these. And you see that I do that in the painting. I'll be mixing into these different strings in different ways. Like I'll take some red and put it over here. Uh, if I'm seeing it's like a mid value kind of reddish orange, or as we're getting darker into like the, some of these yellow or dark yellow notes, we can add a little bit of red and get like a really nice dark, uh, kind of dark orange color. Same with sort of over here. If we need to make it a little more yellow, sometimes it's nice. I tend to start with like the darker yellow first, mix that yellow in. So we can get like a darker yellow kind of shadow, shadow effect. When we see that kind of greenish, uh, shadow look, uh, when it's greener, it tends to be when we, when we're, when, when in a naturalistic lighting situation, an indoor natural lighting situation, if we're seeing green in the skin, it's always a low chroma yellow. Uh, when we're seeing blue, it's always a very neutral color, very neutral, warm Brown. It's a, it's a, it's a visual trick, but it's, it's true. And we went over that, I think a little bit in the, in the Mark Twain, uh, part of this, uh, part of the course, but, uh, and when we, when we're visualizing purple, when we see purple in the skin, it's always a low chroma red. So those are good things to think about. So when you're seeing that, that kind of purpley color, that's sort of hard to distinguish, we know it's a low chroma red. When we're seeing something kind of bluer, we know it's a very neutral gray color. And when we're seeing something green, it's a, it's a, it's a low chroma yellow. And these, these colors, especially when you add white to them, tend to get like a, tend to have like a greenish cast to them, especially in the context of very bright, um, high chroma lights. Like say, um, some of these guys up here, like it starts to, it starts to get a little bit greener, like in comparison to that, uh, when they're kind of right next to each other. Uh, and then finally, like when we really need a peak, our red, like around the nose, around the eyes, sometimes around the ears, around the cheeks, we can add a little bit more of our red, our red mixture up here, or even just straight, uh, quinacridone rose to really spike that chroma towards red. But everything is, it's so value based. Like I try to stay outside of keeping, I try to stay outside of having value jumps, uh, like dark colors of here and light colors down here. We really want like our mid-tones right about here, our lights and our shadows all to be kind of, uh, this like sort of a safe space, you know, where like none of the others, uh, are allowed in. So other than that, mostly, you know, our black is for dark accents, which we see around the eyes. We see like in some dark shadows behind the head. Uh, we see it in the background. Um, for the most part, we don't need it for it's like blue property, like is often used in like the Zorn palette. It's mostly just for like kind of darker accents. I think that's about it. That's about as much as I can explain about like the, the sort of, the sort of Rembrandt inspired, uh, earth tone palette here. I think with a little bit of practice, remember the one thing that I see students, uh, do that are coming from a chromatic palette where you're graying everything down with a complimentary is, uh, by nature, they'll try to lower the chroma of this, uh, red with like, maybe you'll try to do like a yellow ochre and black to make a green to try to neutralize it. That's way too inaccurate. It's better to just to take some of the gray, some of our gray mixture at the exact same value of the color that we're trying to neutralize and put it right in there. So we're not, we're not worried about changing the value very much. And boom, we have like a lower chroma red without any effort whatsoever. And it's at the same value that we want it to be, where if we were trying to do this with like, say a green that we've mixed with like, say a yellow ochre and black, we just don't know how just from looking at it without like a super mathematical mind, if we're trying to lower chroma with the red, with this yellow, is this, or this green, is this green very yellow or is it very blue? And whichever, whichever way it kind of, uh, uh, steers, it'll steer the, uh, the graying of the red. It'll gray it down, but it'll also steer it towards either, uh, either orange or purple, depending on like where it is. It needs to be like exactly on the opposite side of the, of the, uh, of the color wheel to perfectly neutralize it. Otherwise it's going to steer it in one, in one direction. So yeah, neutralize all your colors with the, with the raw umber. You can sometimes, if it's not doing the trick, the Van Dyke brown plus raw umber will make a super neutral gray and that'll really, that'll really pop those grays, like make them like super cool. And then, you know, like I said, with the transparent oxide brown, mix that with a, I almost always mix that with a black. Whenever I'm using ivory black, I almost, I always mix it with something, like I said, to make it dry faster and also to make it more transparent. So it's always, I always add something transparent to it. Uh, transparent oxide brown, brown is great because it dries super fast. It's very transparent. Sometimes I just use the quinacridone rose, makes it a little more purpley. Just does the same thing. It dries a lot faster than the ivory black for sure and helps it, uh, helps it dry a lot better. Kind of looks like the rolling stone tongue. There we go. Thanks for watching. Make sure to hit that like and subscribe button. Uh, also check the description below. I have various links, uh, for opportunities to learn oil painting from me if you are interested. Otherwise, see you next time.