R&F Pigment Sticks® have none of the additives, extenders, substitutes, or facilitators that are commonly used in industrial production. However, it's still a good idea to minimize skin contact with paints and pigments when possible. This is especially true if you will be adding solvents, driers, or other materials when painting.

We return to our blog series "From The Collection" this week to focus on artist and teacher Elise Wagner. R&F is fortunate to have two pieces by Elise in our permanent collection. Elise is a painter and printmaker who has spent the last three decades of her life in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Jersey City, Elise found the subject matter of her work shifted when she moved to Oregon. With paintings that reference climate change, satellite imagery, and aerial photography, Elise's art focuses on the impact humans have had on their environment and raises awareness of how fragile our existence truly is.

Temperature affects virtually everything when you are altering an encaustic surface. Developing a thorough understanding of how temperature impacts wax takes time, but will make you more efficient with brushed on layers (achieving smooth or texture), scraping, collage, transfer, and much more. It can mean the difference between a beautiful crisp image transfer and transfer paper undesirably sticking to your painting. Or getting a clean carved channel to use for line inlay instead of gouging through more layers than you wanted.

One of the best ways to take advantage of the transparent qualities of encaustic and explore color relationships, is to work over a colored ground. Fluid acrylics provide a great way to evenly "tint" R&F Encaustic Gesso prior to applying encaustic or oil paint. You'll find instructions below sharing this simple and effective technique.

We checked in with printmaker and visual artist Kate Collyer to find out the answer to a useful question we hear around the studio. “I've worked my way down to a small piece of R&F Pigment Stick®, can it be used?”

The opacity of a paint describes how it interacts with light. Opaque colors hide what is underneath them, while transparent colors allow light to pass through and partially reveal the underlayer. Our newest demo video highlights the differences between opaque and transparent colors, offering two simple exercises you can do at home to learn more about opacity and transparency.

Diana González Gandolfi is a painter-printmaker with an extensive exhibition record of solo and group shows including the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ; The Noyes Museum, Oceanville, NJ; The Newark Museum, in Newark, NJ; The De Cordova and Lincoln Museum in Lincoln, MA; The Boston Museum of Fine Arts; The Print Club in Philadelphia, PA; The Bronx Museum of Art; The Boston Public Library; and The International Print Center in NYC to name a few. She has also shown internationally in invitational print exhibitions at the Yinchuan Art Gallery in Yinchuan, China; the Khmu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia; Altos de Chevron Gallery in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic; and Centre d’art du Mont-Royale in Montreal, Canada.

Occasionally you make a discovery in the studio that changes the way you go about your process. Our "Handy Tricks & Tips" newsletter is designed to offer you "tips from the pros." We hope this shared knowledge can be a shortcut for some of the more pragmatic items in the studio, so you can get right to the most important part. Creating!

Here at R&F we’ve been busy this past year building helpful content for our followers, everything from articles on working with our paint lines to demo videos designed to inspire and educate. To enable you to access this information more easily we recently added a new resource.

Knowing the attributes of your paint puts you a step ahead as an artist. Being familiar with whether a pigment is transparent or opaque will help you in predicting how the paint will behave and give you a greater command over techniques such as glazing, layering, and color mixing.

This week we place the spotlight on two artists working with encaustic and form in imaginative new ways. Adrian Arleo's impressive ceramic sculptures make use of the natural surface quality of wax. She combines the figure and natural imagery to create a kind of emotional and poetic power. Deborah Kapoor's process-driven work uses contemporary cultural markers to explore narratives related to spaces the body inhabits. Encaustic is often the catalyst for adding dimension and texture into an array of absorbent materials in her work.

Scraping is a technique many artists use with encaustic to reveal the history of layers and color in their painting. This demo video was inspired by R&F Tier Artist Lorraine Glessner who writes a wonderful blog called Art Bite. The tools featured in this demo video include a pear-shaped loop tool, a razor blade, and a wax scraper from Sculpture House.

Ask Richard is back! We chatted with R&F founder Richard Frumess about the burning question seemingly on everyone’s mind - Pigment Stick® drying times.

As your Pigment Sticks® begin to dry, a film of dried paint or "skin" will begin to cover areas exposed to oxygen. If you find a skin has formed on the surface of your stick, you can gently remove it with a paper towel or rag and Linseed oil, or the use of a razor blade. Below, you'll find the steps to remove this dried paint film and to maximize the workable paint within.

You will find in painting with Pigment Sticks® or encaustic that some colors are opaque while others are translucent. Opaque colors tend to be brighter and have a greater ability to hide underlying color and mark making. Translucent colors tend to be deeper and reveal the layer under it.

R&F is fortunate to have four pieces by Abby Goldstein in our permanent collection. We reached out to her to learn more about the encaustic work she did from 2009 to 2013 and how it relates to her other bodies of work.

In this blog post we look at the basic requirements of setting up your space for success. We will cover - materials & tools, ventilation, electrical requirements, and design.

We are often asked for the best way to store R&F paints. As with many of the technical questions we receive, there tends to be more than one correct answer depending on your needs. We checked in with the R&F Core Instructors to learn about some of the products (store-bought and custom-made) and methods they are using in their studios.

Artist Marina Thompson finds stimulation in “the pulse of color and the play of light and texture.” She describes her paintings as an effort to “generate depth, energy, and movement with illusions of volume, space, light, and time.” Marina might just have one of the most amusing pictures on the “About” tab of her website we’ve seen and we are thrilled to have her work Cross Purposes as part of the permanent collection at R&F.