Getting tired of your same old acrylic or oil paints? Make like the ancient Greeks and Romans and give encaustic paints a try. In this method, which dates back more than 2,000 years, a pigmented mixture of beeswax and damar resin is heated until it’s supple enough to apply with a brush. Though they take time to master, encaustics have a subtle sheen once hardened and are ideal for creating sheer layers of color. Below are five encaustic paints that we think deserve more buzz.

ARTNEWS RECOMMENDS R&F Encaustic Paint Starter Kit For the whole kit and kaboodle, consider this starter set by natural paint manufacturer R&F. The Kingston, New York–based company sells brilliant, vibrant, top-of-the-line encaustics in scores of colors. You can buy each individual color in 40-milliliter or 104-milliliter blocks, and some colors come in giant 333-milliliter bricks as well. This set gives you five of the small cakes along with common tools of the trade: brushes, palette cups, cleaning wax, trays for melting, an instruction manual, a color chart, and even unpigmented encaustic pellets you can use as a transparent layer or dye as you wish. It’s a great buy, and all you need to do is bring the heat.

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Buy: R&F Encaustic Paint Starter Kit $85.56

Buy: R&F Encaustic Paint Starter Kit

WE ALSO LIKE Enkaustikos Hot Cakes Encaustic Wax Set Picking between R&F and Enkaustikos, another premier New York–based encaustics manufacturer, is like picking between your children. So trust us when we say Enkaustikos’s Hot Cakes set takes a very close second on our list. Enkaustikos sells its encaustics as thin bars (keep reading for more info on those) as well as in the 45-milliliter metal tins provided in this set. We prefer the tins for brushwork, because all you need to do is set them on a hot surface, wait, and voilà—the wax will melt inside the tin, and you can simply dip your paintbrush in. When you’re finished, simply allow them to cool and harden. You get six Hot Cakes tins and two brushes, plus two types of wax medium and a tin of cleaning wax. The set is pricier than R&F’s, but still a smart buy.

Buy: Enkaustikos Hot Cakes Encaustic Wax Set $107.99

Buy: Enkaustikos Hot Cakes Encaustic Wax Set

ANOTHER GOOD CHOICE Enkaustikos Hot Sticks Encaustic Paints and Sets The appeal of stick-shaped encaustics is that you can grasp them: Heat one end and simply grip them like a crayon. No brush, no problem, right? Not exactly—the hot wax melts quickly, and you can end up with burned fingers if you’re not careful. Enkaustikos’s solution is to wrap its 13-milliliter Hot Sticks in protective paper sleeves that you can adjust or trim as you go. They come in all the evocative hues of their Hot Cakes counterparts, and you can easily buy individual replacement paints when you run low.

Buy: Enkaustikos Hot Sticks Encaustic Paints and Sets $1.99–$24.79

Buy: Enkaustikos Hot Sticks Encaustic Paints and Sets

A GREAT ALTERNATIVE Cray-Pen Wax Pucks These are a little different from the other paints on our list. First, they aren’t strictly encaustics but crayon wax, meaning they’re made from paraffin rather than beeswax. This set is meant to be used with a Cray-Pen, a heated, hollow stylus that allows detailed wax linework and color blending; even so, any manner of heating tool should work for these adorable little wax pucks. (And we do mean little: They’re about the size and thickness of four stacked quarters.) They may not satisfy the experienced encaustic painter, but the price is definitely right: A sampler platter of 32 colors can be had for less than $12.

ARTISTS’ CHOICE Encaustic Art Fantasia Selection Wax Blocks This is a great under-the-radar option for those looking for a basic variety pack. Tucked in a retro box, these eraser-size sticks come in 16 richly varied colors, from mattes to metallics. The quality of these innovative, German-made sticks, which combine multiple wax types, is superb for the price. Already wishing you could buy more? Alas, you’ll have to buy direct from the U.K.-based distributor to get sticks à la carte like competitors R&F and Enkaustikos.

Buy: Encaustic Art Fantasia Selection Wax Blocks $33.00

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This set offers high-quality wax blocks in a wide range of colors at a reasonable price. That makes it the best everyday set in our book, whether you’re just coming to encaustic painting or have some experience. Made in Germany, the blocks consist of a hand-poured combination of waxes, including beeswax and carnauba wax, in a formula that is free of resin for better flow once heated. The resulting product is incredibly stable and melts easily into a smooth and fluid liquid that radiates vibrant color.

Buy: Encaustic Art Landscape Selection Wax Blocks

If you want more colors to use without having to mix them, we recommend this set from the small Rochester, New York, art-supply maker Enkaustikos. It comes with 49 sticks in more than 20 shades: two sticks each of 19 colors, three white sticks, and individual sticks with special qualities. The company sources its pigments carefully to provide paints with excellent tinting strength, light-fastness, and heat stability. While you might balk at the price tag, you actually get a lot of paint (each stick is 13 milliliters in volume) that will last a long time.

Individuals looking for a broad palette at a reasonable price should consider this product. With an assortment of 32 wax disks, it has all the variety you’ll need to create rainbow compositions on virtually any surface. Although marketed to young artists (the paints are easy to heat up, rework, and clean up), this set is also a great choice for any adult who wants to try the medium before investing in pricier paints. Each disk is small—about the size of a Reese’s Mini Peanut Butter Cup—but there’s enough to while away a rainy afternoon or two. Note that you’ll have to dip into and apply this pigment with Surebonder’s metal-tipped Cray-Pen, so don’t forget to pick up one of those as well.

Buy: Surebonder Pallette Wax Pucks

Handmade in small batches in Kingston, New York, with beeswax and damar resin—which enables you to buff the wax to impart a luminous finish—these paints are the best you will find. They are richly pigmented and creamy, and you can add beeswax to extend your colors without losing vibrancy. The paints are available in sets of 40-milliliter blocks of complementary colors, including earth tones, pastels, and translucent hues; you can also purchase individual blocks to keep building your palette.

Buy: R&F Encaustic Paint

This is the perfect set for artists who have never used encaustic wax and want to learn. It comes with tins filled with wax in four basic colors as well as one tin each of slick wax (for cleaning) and wax medium (for extending). To heat them up, simply place the metal containers on a hot plate, and you can dip your brush directly into the liquefied colors. The pigments are bright and mix very well so you can familiarize yourself with encaustics’ blending properties.

Buy: Enkaustikos Encaustic Wax Paint Set

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