Used as an Oil PaintOne way you can use the Pigment Sticks is to treat them as if they were regular tube oils or use them in combination with tube oils. But you hold them in your hand. (Almost like squeezing a tube right on the canvas.) You can work on any surface you would an oil. Use brushes, solvents, and rags once the paint is on the surface. Many people dip the sticks in mediums or Alkyd driers and then attack the surface. Some people use them to start a painting with a quick sketch. Some will do their painting with tubes and brushes and then put in final details and lines with the sticks. Some artist such as Abby Goldstein (below) use the sticks through out the work and use the wax content of the sticks to build up beautiful textures.
PortabilityOne of the great advantages of Pigment Sticks is that they are very portable. You can take a box of them with you in the field or to a modeling session and forget the brushes, palette and solvents. You can use then to do preliminary sketches and then finish up later in the studio. Used as Drawing ToolPigment Sticks are being used a lot as drawing tools. Many instructors use them in their drawing classes or in drawing marathons. They are a wonderful link between drawing and painting. They can be used to introduce color and spontaneity. They force people to loosen up. You can get wonderful passages of color and line, as shown in the detail of Cynthia Winika's drawing below.
Mono-typesPrint makers are falling in love with Pigment Sticks. Any of you who have spent hours trying to mix colors with only nine or ten printmaking inks will find our palette of 77 colors very liberating. The colors, immediacy, and mark making ability can give you many options. A great point (shown in the detail of Cynthia's drawing below) is that the small amount of wax in the stick gives a texture and definition to the marks after they are run through the press.
Fusing Pigment SticksPigment Sticks are very soft and have very little wax in them compared to other crayons. But the wax is there and can be used in the technique shown below. By lightly fusing the paint with a hot air gun you can get different effects. (This technique is somewhat of a hybrid between oil painting and encaustic. For more about encaustic and fusing visit our Encaustic section.)
Other Grounds and SurfacesPigment Sticks can be used on any ground that you use for oil paint. Normally that means a sized canvas or paper. But there are other surfaces to use. Clay coated papers are great. The slick surface helps to bring out many of the subtle undertones of the colors. Clayboard is a nice surface, that is somewhat absorbent. This causes the paint to dry faster and with more of a matte finish. An interesting technique is shown here. It is a hybrid of etching, encaustic, drawing and painting. Cynthia takes a lightweight board and coats it with beeswax or encaustic. Then she takes a pointed tool and sketches the figure. She rubs in Pigment Stick and then wipes parts of it away. This leaves a great combination of etched line, toned backgrounds and color fields. |
By heating the
paint on the surface you can get interesting melting and running effects as shown in the
left hand detail. But the greatest advantage is speed. Fusing does not dry the paint, but
it does make it somewhat tacky. So it dries it enough that you can pass another color
lightly over the surface and leave another layer behind. This way you do not have to wait
days between layers. The detail on the right shows a cadmium red over cadmium orange over
a mars yellow over a cadmium yellow. You can build up layers and textures very fast. This
painting was done in one session.