R&F Pigment Sticks® are oil paint with enough wax for the paint to be molded into stick form. They allow the painter to draw or paint directly onto a surface without brushes, palettes, paint tubes, or solvents. We use only the basic traditional materials: natural wax (beeswax an plant wax), linseed oil, and pigment. The result is an oil stick with a lipstick soft consistency.
Pigment Sticks® have none of the additives, extenders, substitutes, or facilitators that are commonly used in industrial production. While the use of these adulterants can save time and reduce cost, they lower the quality of the paint. To do without them it is necessary to create a very precise balance of the ingredients. Our formulas are complex and our manufacturing is labor-intensive, handmade in small batches, carefully milled and molded.
Pigment Sticks® are excellent as stand-alone painting and drawing tools. They are a wonderful bridge between drawing and painting and their very nature causes artists to loosen up, use more color, and be spontaneous and gestural. And anyone who has spent hours trying to mix colors with only nine or ten printmaking inks will find our palette of 91 colors very liberating. Their immediacy, and mark making ability afford an endless range of options.
Benefits to Working with Pigment Sticks®
• They can be thinned with turpentine or mineral spirits.
• They can be worked with mediums by dipping them into stand oil, linseed oil, alkyd mediums, or resin gels.
• They can be mixed alongside tube oils or used to draw over dried oil paintings.
• Pigment Sticks® can be manipulated with a paint knife until the paint is a buttery consistency, so that it can be brushed or knifed onto the surface. This method can be used to mix colors on the palette or in the painting.
Pigment Stick® Grounds
Pigment Sticks® can be used on any ground suitable for use with traditional tube oil paint. Normally that means a sized canvas, panel, or paper. Ampersand’s Gessobord™ is ideal because of its dimensional stability. More absorbent surfaces like clay coated papers or Ampersand’s Encausticbord™ will cause the paint to dry faster and leave a matte finish that is preferable to some painters. When thoroughly dry, Pigment Sticks® can be varnished just as you would an oil painting.
Sizing: As in oil painting, all canvas and paper surfaces should be sized. To size, use one or two coats of acrylic gesso, acrylic medium, or PVA sizing. Other options include: rabbit skin glue and shellac.
Grounds: Any ground (ie: gesso) suitable for traditional oil paint can be used with R&F Pigment Sticks®.
Recommended supports for Pigment Sticks® include: stretched canvas; paper; clay-coated paper; Ampersand’s Encausticbord™ or Gessobord™; lauan, plywood, or masonite panels; copper, iron, or aluminum; glass; and plexiglas.
R&F Blending Medium and Blending Sticks are essentially Pigment Sticks® without pigment. They are ideal for glazing colors, can be worked directly into a color to increase the color's transparency, or used to blend colors together on the surface. Available with drier and without. Our sticks with drier contain a small amount of Cobalt Drier added to speed up the drying time. The use of a Cobalt Drier can affect color, so best use is to work colors on top of it after it has been laid down on the surface.