In our newest feature - Notes On Color - we will share with you a few of our thoughts each week on color. Maybe you'll learn a thing or two. Maybe you'll discover a color you aren't using already and must acquire. At the very least, we hope you find this entertaining. It's full of eye candy for you color aficionados.

Our ongoing feature "Meet The Team" is our way of introducing you to the fine folks behind the scenes who make R&F possible.⁠ In this week’s installment, you will meet Dietlind Vander Schaaf. Dietlind has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and an MA from the University of Southern Maine. She has exhibited widely and her work has been featured in Maine Home + Design, Decor Maine, UPPERCASE, and Downeast magazines.

n this “Meet The Team” post you will meet Alyssa Gougoutris. Alyssa is one of R&F’s paint-makers - that indispensable group of people behind the scenes trained to create each of the 103 different colors in our encaustic and Pigment Stick® lines.

She has also taken quite a few of our Instagram photos. You might remember her gorgeous pink nails that perfectly matched Dianthus Pink a few weeks back? That’s Alyssa.

Lisa Pressman works and teaches in a variety of mediums, among them oil, encaustic, cold wax, and mixed-media collage. Her work is abstract, conceptually based, and process-driven. It features marks, forms, colors, and patterns that are evocative rather than descriptive. A New Jersey native, Lisa received her Bachelor of Arts degree in fine art from Douglass College at Rutgers University in 1979 and her Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Bard College in 1981. Her work is represented by Susan Eley Fine Arts in New York, Addington Gallery in Chicago, and Slate in Telluride, Colorado.

Wayne Montecalvo works with image and materials in order to push the confines of art making to reinvent, rather than reproduce an image. His process involves “allowing an idea to emerge organically through curiosity.” Through a manipulation of materials, he distorts and redefines an image, starting with the expected and ending with something mysterious. His approach is painterly; an effort to find a new way to encounter the familiar. R&F is proud to have a piece of Wayne’s work in our permanent collection.

We are proud of all of our employees, from our paintmakers to the folks answering the phone and packing orders, and everyone in between. Over the next few months we will be sharing a feature called "Meet The Team" to introduce you to the fine folks behind the scenes who make R&F possible.⁠

We kick off our inaugural “Meet The Team” post with one of our newest employees - Luke Benicase. Luke grew up and attended school through the 12th grade in Kingston, before going on to SUNY Ulster and SUNY New Paltz.

We continue our series on color mixing with recommendations from instructors Jeff Hirst, Jodi Reeb, and Lorraine Glessner. (If you missed our previous color mixing posts, go back and check out Color Mixing with Debra Claffey and Susan Stover or Color Mixing with Julie Snidle and Dietlind Vander Schaaf.)

This week Jeff illustrates how he creates cool and warm chromatic grays. Jodi shares how she makes a variation on orange for her circle paintings. And Lorraine explains the way she creates the range of whites that can be found in her monoprints.

R&F Handmade Paints makes eight iridescent paints, all of which are available in both our encaustic and Pigment Stick color lines®. If you haven’t begun exploring these yet, you are missing out.

When working with our iridescent color line, we recommend not extending them with much medium as that will tamp down the iridescence slightly. Designed to be standalone favorites, each of our metallic colors can be added to our transparent paints to create unique richly luminous colors.

Artist Laura Moriarty makes process-driven 2D and 3D works with encaustic whose forms, colors, textures, and patterns result from processes similar to those that shape and reshape the earth: heating and cooling, erosion, subduction, friction, enfolding, weathering, slippage.

This week - in keeping with our ongoing international focus - we highlight two UK artists who teach encaustic painting. This might be of interest if you live in the region, are planning a trip to the area and want to tack on a workshop, or even if you are just looking to escape for a moment and travel vicariously. Lyn Kirkland and Julie Ann Wrathall share a bit about their backgrounds and teaching in their own words below.

Bay Area artist Sharon Paster’s work reflects her attraction to the energy around her, “the force of a pounding surf, the motion of cars on a highway, the blink of an eye, the way objects in space talk to one another.” Her colorful oil paintings are an effort to suspend time, capturing movement and change.

Leslie Giuliani is one of our Core instructors and has taught at R&F for many years. She offers private and small group instruction out of her home studio in Weston, Connecticut, and teaches at various art centers and venues throughout New England. Leslie’s work often combines digital embroidery, hand embroidery, digital textile printing, sewing, encaustic, and cold wax. She has written for Rug Hooking and Hand/Eye magazines and is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Grant for Craft from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Her work is included in the Housatonic Museum of Art.

We continue our series on color mixing with recommendations from instructors Debra Claffey and Susan Stover. This week Debra illustrates how she uses three different Pigment Sticks® to create secondary colors, tints, and shades. Susan shares how she makes one of her favorite colors using two encaustic paints she always keeps on hand.

Encaustic medium is an essential component to encaustic painting. It can be used underneath a painting to build up the surface of your substrate, added to paint to extend it or create a glaze, or cast and sculpted in any number of ways. In our latest demo video we highlight basic application, as well as a technique using tape and medium to create a clean edge on the surface of your encaustic painting.

Margaret Ryall is a Canadian artist living in St. John's, Newfoundland. After a fulfilling career as an educator, Margaret shifted her focus to visual art and has participated in group and solo shows since 2001. Her summers spent on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Duntara, NL have had a profound impact on her artistic practice.

Recently we chatted with instructors Julie Snidle and Dietlind Vander Schaaf about their favorite color mixes. Julie creates a wide range of colors in a playful and experimental manner using a limited palette. Dietlind uses a combination of colors to make chromatic black underpaintings.

George Mason has a background in ceramic architectural tile and his work is steeped in the exploration of materials and history. Richly textured and saturated with color, the largest of his “relief tapestries” are pieced together panels that occupy entire walls.