Courses
Most courses are offered live online through Catalyst Art Lab, with occasional exceptions. These are recorded and available for 90 days. They repeat yearly. Two courses below are self-directed, recorded, and available without limit.
Don’t miss out! Join the Studio News list at the bottom of each page below and email Paula with questions.
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Carbon Lab
The next Carbon Lab course will be in 2026. This is an encaustic painting workshop that will extend your painting skills, spark ideas, and employ new materials to help your work stand out. You will develop content and a conceptual edge.
Carbon Lab is an experimental live online course that expands encaustic painting by working with carbon-based materials (mainly powdered graphite and inks) and explores carbon’s link to the climate. We review artists who used these materials as well. -
* NEW * Focus: ADD MORE! Building Successful Wax Monotypes
April 9 – 30, 2025 / Wednesdays, 1 – 3 PM, CST. Construct prints, element by element, like an architect or builder, while staying open to creative discovery. A builder's intuition helps navigate obstacles to a predetermined destination; the artist's intuition explores emerging possibilities. One deploys technical expertise to control variables, the other to dance with them. Read more…
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* NEW * Focus: ADD Mixed Media to Monotypes
May 21 – June 11, 2025 / Wednesdays, 1 – 3 PM CST. Once you understand the properties and interactions, mixed media may be part of most encaustic monotypes. Use colored or black inks, watercolor, pencil, charcoal, R&F oil stick, oil pastel, cold wax medium, and more. ADD Mixed Media to Monotypes opens for registration on or about April 25, 2025. More information coming soon. Make sure you are on my email list!
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Focus: Saturated Wax Monotypes
September 3 – October 1, 2025. Juicy and Waxy Encaustic Prints! An in-depth, fun course, discovering ways to manipulate paper and heat. This method provides a very wax-saturated print surface, similar to encaustic paintings, but on paper. These prints are lush and abstract, with an organic relationship to nature and natural phenomena. Wax sits on the surface of the paper, and some translucent encaustic and papers may even be lit from behind.
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Focus: Encaustic Monotype Drawing and Mark-Making
October 29, 5, and 12 and December 3, 2025. This course investigates the relationship between drawing, painting, and monotype printing with heated encaustic wax. The aim is to develop a personal visual language and voice with this fluid medium. We explore mark-making, unusual tools, and approaches to working additively and subtracitively. Paula’s prompts and exercises open pathways to expression, including the figure and landscape, while knowing and embracing that the nature of wax is to always tend toward abstraction.
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Zen, Big Brush, and Expressive Ink Painting/Mark-Making
Next Session is in 2026. “Zen” takes you on meditative walks, to brush-making, calligraphy, use of the big brush/mop, abstract/expressive ink painting, and connections between Asian artists and the abstract expressionists. You will produce numerous ink-on-paper pieces to stand alone or use with encaustic, acrylic, collage, etc. “A confident bold mark can be the statement that pulls a piece together.”
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Brave Space: Working Large with Mixed (Water Based) Media
Next Session is in 2026. This workshop brings together the team of Paula Roland and Jeff Hirst, two artists with many years of professional experience who often collaborate on teaching. Both use paper extensively and have designed a workshop that merges the use of large paper (up to 5’) and water-based media. Paula and Jeff focus on physicality and materials in their own work, with an emphasis on intuitive explorations that ultimately lead to the development of personal or desired content for themselves and their students.
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DIPPED IN WAX. A Digital/Self-Directed Course
What's Covered in This Course? —Create surfaces and substrates that are either translucent or opaque by submerging paper repeatedly in heated wax/encaustic. Use these as surfaces for painting in encaustic, oil or oil stick, graphite, or inks—There are so many possibilities!
— Transform found or crafted objects by repeated dipping in wax/encaustic.
— Discover numerous unique presentation/installation options.
— Receive a wealth of resources, including Materials and Health & Safety. Contains numerous detailed videos of techniques and examples. -
Encaustic Monotypes: Painterly Prints with Heat and Wax. A Digital/Self Directed Course
Paula Roland’s classic introductory course for Monotypes, professionally filmed in 2010, is recommended for those new to encaustic or wax monotypes or those needing a refresher. The course covers materials, health and safety, and the basic techniques Dorothy Gardner and Paula Roland developed. With this immediate freeing process, you will create an armload of prints and be fully inspired and confident to continue to Paula’s other monotype courses. Resources are provided on presentation and framing, terms, variables, a temperature chart, and a detailed guide to each video section. It also includes a special video section where Paula shares her monotypes.