OUR COLORS
What makes them different?
Our professional quality encaustic paint is made by mixing USP Beeswax, Damar Gum, and carefully milled pigments.
At Enkaustikos, we are dedicated to creating professional artist grade colors and use only the finest ingredients, regardless of costs. Our paints contain US Pharmaceutical (USP) Grade Beeswax, Damar Gum, and Artist Grade Pigments.
The USP Beeswax we use is a natural beeswax that goes through a heat filtering process that removes pollen and other natural adulterants that honey bees bring back to the honeycomb. This a chemical-free filtering process and it produces a highly refined beeswax without the use of bleaches.
By using the USP Beeswax in our paints, it eliminates chemicals and bleaches from the artist's encaustic palette. USP Beeswax is the same type of beeswax that is used in the medical and cosmetics industry.
Another natural ingredient that we use is Damar Gum, a type of hardened tree sap. We heat filter it to remove bark and other debris that may have been trapped inside the sticky sap. It is important to note that we do not use damar varnish because it is made with turpentine, which is not only flammable but also harmful to breathe.
Before we add any pigments to our color line we do extensive research and testing. There are many different factors that we consider such as tinting strength, lightfastness, and heat stability. Encaustic colors will typically be heated between 150 to 175 degrees Fahrenheit. There will be times when an artist inadvertently overheats an area with a hot air gun, which could cross the 200 degree barrier. Consequently, artists working in this medium must be concerned with the stability of their pigments under every possible condition.
We select only pigments that are lightfast and engineered to withstand the heated encaustic process. When you use Enkaustikos paints you can be assured that they are not just good for encaustic art, but are designed from the start specifically for all encaustic techniques.
Our milling operation utilizes advanced technology to shear pigment to their ultimate particle size. Our equipment has taken paint making to a whole new level in both color and quality. We are manufacturing a paint that is richer, creamier, cleaner, and more vibrant than ever before possible. With our milling system, we are able to bring out the true personality of each pigment used.
Until the availability of professionally milled paint, artists had to make their own encaustic paint. Making your own paint is not only time consuming, but the results are inconsistent. In addition, artists are working with powdered pigments so extra health precautions should be exercised. Today’s artist working in encaustic are more like acrylic, oil and watercolor artists who prefer to spend their valuable time painting rather than making paint.
Hand Made Paint
Our milling process ensures that pigments are finely ground, shearing the clumps of pigment to tiny particles and evenly dispersing them in our wax medium. Without our careful milling, the pigments will remain clumped - this issue often occurs when you mix your own paint because it is difficult to mill the pigments this finely without this state of the art equipment. You could stir by hand for days and not get better results! This uncompromising approach ensures our paint is smooth, clean, and creamy with the most vibrant and rich color results.
Our paint line offers more single pigment paints than any other encaustic paint company! Enkaustikos mills over 100 colors, a majority of which are single pigment paints.
Why is a single pigment paint so important? Single pigment paints allow artist the greatest opportunity to create intense, clean, and luminous color mixes. A good rule to follow when it comes to color mixing is to use the least number of pigments to create your custom mix. The more pigments you use to make a custom mix the more likely you are to make a muddy and dull paint.
If you want to "gray down" a paint color, your best option is to mix complimentary single pigment paints together. This method will ensure your grays are rich and radiant. Using single pigment colors are the key to producing the best mixes.
We are dedicated to providing our customers with the most beautiful, rich, vibrant encaustic colors available. In order to do this, we heavily pigment our colors with the finest artist-grade pigments. Below you will see a good example of far you can extend and tint our colors featuring Sanguine, an opaque composite paint.
The top row demonstrates how our highly pigmented colors extend beautifully as more wax medium is added to it. The integrity of the color shines through no matter the ratio of paint to medium.
Our paints are also formulated to tint beautifully, as you can see in the bottom row. We added Titanium White to Sanguine and it retains the strong, warm, vibrant qualities of the color at every level of tinting.
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