What crime would you commit if you knew you wouldn’t get caught?” My mother asked me this question when I was eight years old, prompting a long string of thoughts about ethics, getaways, and her avant-garde parenting style. After some thought, I settled on an an­swer: a combination of art forgery and theft, wherein I would copy a priceless artwork, steal the original from its lauded museum home, and replace it with my (obvi­ously masterful) fake.

To that end, I was hoping that last Saturday’s “Im­postors in the Gallery” lecture and workshop hosted by Yale STEAM would teach me how to reverse engi­neer the perfect forgery. The group tries to unite the arts with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Dr. Ian Mc­Clure, the Susan Morse Hilles Chief Conserva­tor at the Yale University Art Gallery, described the various techniques he and the other conserva­tion specialists use when they suspect that a work is a copy.

Using my burgeon­ing forgery skills, I lied my way through an ap­plication and got into the workshop at the last minute (sorry, Yale STEAM). Aniko Bezur and Jens Stenger, two of the conservators at Yale’s West Campus Institute for the Pres­ervation of Cultural Heritage, walked us through the process of corroborating a work’s authenticity. I took notes on how to bam­boozle the experts.

Step One: Paint on rotten wood. McClure pointed out the importance of the quality of the wood in deter­mining if an object is authentic. Old panels are usu­ally eaten through by woodworms, and certain types of wood were used in different locations and eras—for example, there has always been a split in materials used north and south of the Alps. (His description gave rise to one of my most pretentious sentences ever, which included the phrase “intrinsic artisanal proclivity for poplar.”)

Step Two: Add unnecessary changes to the prelimi­nary sketch. Bezur and Stenger used an infrared cam­era on a segment of a Miguel Ximenez altarpiece to show its carbon underpainting. Under infrared light, paint becomes transparent, but carbon materials, which were typically used to sketch the composition before painters began, are still visible. In most origi­nal works, the underpainting has a sketch-like quality with noticeable adjustments and changes in the com­position. Copies, I learned, are much more precise, because the artist knows exactly what form the figures should take.

Step Three: Mix metals. Every color of paint uses various minerals in its pigment, and conservators test tiny paint samples to ensure that the yellows or reds are made of the materials available to the artist at the time. They also showed us how lead, zinc, and titani­um whites fluoresce differently under ultraviolet light. Sadly though, my UV glasses made me look more like a dork than a cool, evil mastermind.

It might not matter, howev­er, because I don’t think I’ll be ready to scheme anytime soon. McClure got very absorbed in looking at a painting under a high-power microscope and forgot all about forgery in his rapture over its waxy coating. At that point, he lost me. As much as I love talking about cleaning art, I really just want­ed to plan an Ocean’s Twelve-style heist. Until I get more tips, my career as an inter­national art thief will have to wait. One day, Mom, one day.