The Encaustic Painter's Dozen: Chromium Oxide Green, Alizarin Orange & Ultramarine Blue Pale
Dietlind Vander Schaaf, Beso, 36” x 36”, encaustic and Pigment Stick® on panel, 2021.
We complete our exploration of the Encaustic Painter's Dozen with Chromium Oxide Green, Alizarin Orange & Ultramarine Blue Pale. Below artists Jeff Hirst, Leslie Giuliani, and Dietlind Vander Schaaf describe these colors and discuss how they use them in their work.
Our limited edition Encaustic Painter's Dozen is a great value. Available now through the holidays.
Jeff Hirst, Strata Movements, 8" x 8", encaustic on panel.
"Chromium Oxide Green is an opaque color that dates back to the eighteenth century. Both Turner and Monet used it to create muted tones. In the painting above I worked with Chromium Oxide Green, Cadmium Red Light, Titanium White, Ivory Black, and R&F encaustic medium. Mixing Chromium Oxide Green with these other colors reveals a wide range of value from chromatic grays to prismatic color. In my own work, I frequently tint Chromium Oxide Green with Titanium White and a bit of encaustic medium, or make it translucent by adding a high ratio of medium to reveal colors below."
- R&F Core Instructor Jeff Hirst
Leslie Giuliani, The Cycle, 20” x 16”, stitched encaustic painting on Encaustiflex.
"It is easy to overlook Alizarin Orange among similar colors in a display. It might appear dull by comparison to Cadmium Orange or Cadmium Red Light. But Alizarin Orange is pure magic when you paint with it - like painting with fiery orange light. Its translucency can light up a painting with a stained-glass effect, illuminating details from an underpainting. Alizarin Orange can bring a muted painting back from the brink with just a glaze. It has saved the day for me many a time."
- R&F Core Instructor Leslie Giuliani
Dietlind Vander Schaaf, Cloudscape, 40" x 40", encaustic, Pigment Stick, and 23 karat gold leaf on panel.
"Ultramarine Blue Pale is my go-to color. I use it as a chromatic white or add it to other colors to lighten them. Ultramarine is a deep blue pigment originally made by grinding lapis lazuli into a fine powder. The name comes from the Latin word ultramarinus - meaning "beyond the sea" and it was considered the finest and most expensive blue used by Renaissance painters. R&F's Ultramarine Blue Pale is a cool blue with a hint of violet and gray. It adds an airy expansiveness to my paintings, in which the subject is often a body of water or the sky. It feels clean, bright, hopeful."
- R&F Core Instructor Dietlind Vander Schaaf