In Collaboration with the Netherlands Embassy of San francisco…

Presented at CES 2019, the Netherlands Embassy of San Francisco hired me to recreate the Night Watch by Rembrandt as part of their opening at the Holland Tech Square.

Under a short deadline, I recreated the grand masterpiece, including 30+ figures(!), to be presentable at CES. The priority was to paint all the pieces to look accurate from front-view, mimicking the 2D painting. Upon further exploration, the viewer would step into the piece and see that some of the figures had been extruded and had depth and mass to them.

The main challenge was to paint the realistic sides and backs to the figures. Because there are many figures blocking others in the 2D original painting, the not-visible or ‘missing’ parts of the figures required researching the Dutch armor + clothing design for that time period.

Did you know the original Night Watch composition was cropped? I included the parts — and figures — that was cropped from Rembrandt’s original.

This is an on-going work in progress.

Virtual Reality
Illustration
Tilt Brush

Objective

• Adapt the grand Rembrandt painting from 2D into VR

• Present and live-paint this piece at a large conference

• Add dimension, depth, and space to the story of this masterpiece

Challenges

• So many figures! 30+ figures! Rembrandt! Why!

• How to “fill in” the parts where figures are blocking other figures

• Interpreting parts of the painting that have been lost over time due to cropping and weathering

• Tight timeline