R&F Tier Artist Instructor Debra Claffey earned her BFA in painting from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and an AAS in Horticultural Technology from the University of New Hampshire. In both 2011 and 2021, she received grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been shown throughout New England, including AVA Gallery, the Southern Vermont Arts Center Gallery, Cotuit Center for the Arts, and at Worcester State University, and is part of the permanent collection of Laventhol & Horwath in Boston.

Yes, in fact we recommend giving it a try. Our Pigment Sticks® offer a terrific tool for painting and "drawing" directly onto your support. Beyond this, as you play and push their limits, and combine them with items you may already have in your studio, you'll find out just how much you can do.

We return to our toptone and undertone series with three colors known for their expansive range and transparent qualities. Stil de Grain, being a synthetic iron oxide, has a clean top tone, and its undertone is golden yellow. Payne's Grey is a very deep eggplant violet and a good replacement for black, since it will not sully other colors. If you work the color (such as a scumble technique) you can bring out the more neutral grey undertones. Brown Pink has a dark reddish-brown top tone and a fiery pinkish-brown undertone. It's like an intense Burnt Sienna and makes an excellent glaze.

This week we'd like to share a few beauty shots of the toptones (also referred to as masstone) and undertones of our color lines. Toptone describes concentrated color where little to no light can get through to reflect off the substrate below. Undertone is how the color appears once it is thinned or extended so light can pass through.

To keep your edges clean and crisp, we recommend preparing your panel edges with tape. While it's not a requirement there are some notable benefits to taping your support prior to painting. Alternatively some artists choose to allow the history of their process to move or drip along the edge of their paintings, this can also be quite beautiful and telling of your technique! For the purposes of this newsletter, we will focus on the benefits and "how-to" of taping sections or all of the edges of your artwork.

This week we'd like to share a helpful technique for working with our R&F Blending Medium with Drier. In addition to aiding with blending and glazing, our Blending Medium with Drier can be used as your initial painting layer to encourage a quicker and more even drying time of oil paintings - including R&F Pigment Sticks®. The goal is to achieve a thin even coat of medium, allowing it to dry overnight in preparation to your painting process. It's a simple and valuable process, and we've included the steps below.

The third in our summer series of live virtual demos will take place on June 22 from 1:30 - 2:30 pm Central Time (CT). Join R&F Core Instructor Jeff Hirst for Working Large with Transparent & Opaque Encaustic Paint. Jeff will discuss scaling up with encaustic, playing warm and cool colors against one another, and choosing appropriate tools for approaching a large painting. Learn more about R&F’s line of opaque, transparent, and semi-transparent encaustic paints.

The proper care and storage of encaustic and R&F Pigment Stick® paintings is similar in many ways to the handling of all fine art. For this reason we want to share with you a terrific resource written by the pros in the conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Artist David A. Clark has shown at a range of locations including OTA Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tucson, Arizona; The Painting Center in New York City; and the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, California, among others. His work has appeared in Art in Print magazine and is in the permanent collections of both the Process Museum and the Hunterdon Art Museum. He is an annual presenter at the International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown and has taught at R&F, Idyllwild Art Center, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, and internationally at Zijdelings in The Netherlands. R&F is delighted to have a piece of his work in our permanent collection. We spoke with David recently to learn a bit more about his work and process.

This week we return to the origins and development of the R&F color names and the pigments they are comprised of. We begin with two vigorous colors, Sap Green and Raw Sienna. These colors have an extensive history in the world, and are known for their luminous undertones.

Quinacridone Red, Green Earth, Dianthus Pink, Ancient Gold...all great names, but where do they come from? To understand where we get many of the R&F color names you'll need to open your history books. The names are most commonly derived from the pigment that makes up each color (and in our case multiple pigment mixes), but not always. Each one is unique, and many have backstories as rich as the colors themselves.

This week we designed our newsletter to connect artists and to share their work. We reached out to R&F Teaching Artist Wayne Montecalvo and asked him to suggest an artist he recently worked with in a workshop, and whose work shared a similar spirit. Wayne is known for experimental approaches in making his mixed media and photography work. Wayne's suggestion, Nanette Rae Freeman, also utilizes an array of materials, printed imagery, and encaustic to explore her personal narrative.

As you apply layers of encaustic paint to your support you will need to fuse (or re-heat) each and every layer to ensure it adheres to your ground or substrate. Heat guns and torches are great tools for fusing encaustic. They each have their own benefits, but for the purpose of this newsletter we will be focusing on fusing with a butane torch.

In 2018 and 2019, R&F Core Instructor Jeff Hirst taught experimental printmaking workshops at Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo in Ireland, an opportunity that came about through his connection to artist Rebecca Crowell. They met when they were both teaching at Cullowhee Arts in North Carolina. Rebecca admired the work being produced in Jeff’s workshop and he invited her to his studio in Chicago.

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.