Demo Video: R&F Pigment Sticks®
Our newest demo video highlights the wide range of things you can do with R&F Pigment Sticks®. Pigment Sticks® are high quality oil paint with just enough wax added to maintain a solid stick form. They bring color, texture, and immediacy, allowing you to draw and paint directly or manipulate with a palette knife, brush, or brayer.
Our paint has none of the additives, extenders, or substitutes commonly used in industrial production. We work with only beeswax and plant wax, linseed oil, and pigment. Our formulas are complex and our manufacturing is labor-intensive, handmade in small batches, carefully milled and molded. The result is an oil stick with a lipstick soft consistency.
R&F Pigment Sticks® can be used on any ground suitable for traditional tube oil paint, including stretched canvas and primed wood panels. Ampersand’s Gessobord is ideal because of its dimensional stability, which offers excellent resistance to pressure.
The stick form offers a wonderful bridge between drawing and painting, allowing artists to be spontaneous and gestural. And just like traditional tube oil, R&F Pigment Sticks® can be manipulated with a palette knife and brushed or knifed onto a surface. They can be thinned with turpentine or mineral spirits and worked with other mediums to increase transparency, add gloss, and speed up drying time.
(Speaking of drying times, that might just be the number one question we get when it comes to the sticks. The answer is that it depends on the color you are using, how thickly it is laid on the substrate, and the relative humidity in your studio. You can find an index of drying times categorized as Very Slow, Slow, Medium, and Fast on the back of one of our Color Charts. Pick up a Color Chart at any retailer who carries our products or download one from our Resources page.)
Materials used in this demo include: R&F Pigment Sticks®, R&F Blending Medium, Ampersand Gessobord, Arches Oil Paper, and Gamblin Galkyd Lite. Squeegees and brayers were provided by Cold Wax Academy. The stencil used was created by R&F Core Instructor Leslie Giuliani and can be found on her website.
To learn more about working with Pigment Sticks®, we recommend a taking a class. Check out at Catalyst Art Lab where a few of our Core Instructors are offering virtual workshops or visit our Resources page to download a pdf on artists who teach with our products.