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Community Enthusiast Events at Wet Paint Professionals

Enkaustikos, a New Wax Cycle

As art movements wax and wane between figurative and landscape, realism and abstraction, the popularity of mediums change with the era too.  Encaustic, the art of painting with wax, is one of the oldest techniques, dating back to antiquity.  Anyone sitting through a required history and techniques class in college touched on the subject.  In the second half of the 20th century, there were diverse individual artists who picked up the process such as Jasper Johns and Brice Marden.  Until recently, dipping into encaustics meant reading recipes, acquiring the raw materials and manufacturing your own color and mediums.

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Kathryn Bevier monoprint using Enkaustikos paints

As we approached the end of the 20th century, a few art materials manufacturers came up with formulas to create “readymade” encaustic colors and mediums so artists could spend their time making art rather than making paint.  One of these companies, Enkaustikos, has taken the block of colored wax a few steps further.  They looked at the block of wax that artists put into a metal pot on their heated surface to melt and decided to sell their color in shoe polish sized tins to eliminate this step in the process.  Since then they have pressed their wax paint into “Sticks” and “Snaps,” giving the artist smaller increments for using colored wax and also giving them wax shapes to use like drawing materials.  They have taken some of the oldest art materials and reshaped them to meet contemporary artists’ needs.

Hot-Sticks-MonoprintingSome of these developments have turned into great materials to use encaustic techniques in monoprinting.  Printmaking has also experienced resurgence recently.  The marrying of these two techniques reflects the current movement of mixed media art making.

We want you to experience encaustic and encaustic monoprinting for yourself.  Join Kathryn Bevier from Enkaustikos this Saturday, January 18th, at Wet Paint.  Kathryn not only works as an encaustic artist but is involved in the manufacturing of the Enkaustikos product line.  This is a great opportunity to try out something new and ask a bunch of questions of a true expert in the field.

Click here for details and sign up for this demo.

Categories
Community Enthusiast Events at Wet Paint Professionals

Winter Thaw at Wet Paint

bcutts11Mother Nature has given us a nasty New Year’s gift of sub-zero weather.  It is over and we do hope you get out of the house and studio and come and see us at Wet Paint.  We will be heating it up more than usual this Saturday with our friend Bonnie Cutts.  Bonnie is our regional working artist for Golden Artist Colors and she can raise the temp on your artistic flow through her creativity, enthusiasm and product knowledge.  Bonnie will demonstrate Golden Artist’s Colors newest product line, High Flow Acrylics.

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Beth’s doodle with High Flow in a paint marker (yes, that is Bonnie’s picture)

Golden looks at how artists use paint today and formulate their lines to better meet their demands.  They took a limited market product in their airbrush color and transformed it into High Flow so it can be used with airbrush, empty paint markers, technical pens, as well as your more traditional painting tools.

If you’re a seasoned Golden Artist Color enthusiast, you probably wonder what the difference is between High Flow and Fluid.  Bonnie will not just answer that question but let you test the product side by side along with its application to different acrylic grounds.

Darin, Wet Paint’s General Manager, considers Golden’ s High Flow to be one of the hot products of 2013. I just loaded an empty paint marker with some High Flow and it’s quite a bit of drawing fun.

Get those artist juices flowing again.