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| Lilies for Diego 16 x 16 cold wax and oil Available here |
W-A-X. Specifically beeswax. I’ve experienced the world of hot wax (encaustic)
painting and am now diving into cold wax. I now routinely mix cold wax with my
oil paints for traditional painting on panels.
Hot or cold, wax is a blast!
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| Fireworks Encaustic. 6 x 6 Available here |
I
have a preference for working with cold over hot. It’s 100 degrees outdoors! Working with cold
materials in summer is preferable to working with hot materials. Setting up with cold wax is also quite simple
compared to encaustic. Painting with encaustic materials requires hot plates, electric
blowers, dishes of hot pigments, gloves, and a vent system. Cold wax merely
requires a tub of prepared beeswax paste and a palette knife for mixing it with
your tube pigments.
In either
case, beeswax imparts wonderful qualities to the paint. The translucent quality
it lends to the pigment is immediately apparent. It changes the consistency of the paint so
that the artist can manipulate the paint to achieve different textures and
edges. And the cold wax mixture, non-toxic, sets up faster than oil alone.
According to an article at the web page for Cold Wax Painting,
there’s no need to worry about the traditional oil painting rule of “fat over lean”
(for non-oil painters all that means is how much oil your paint has in it—for
drying and cracking reasons, the oilier paint goes on top of paint that is less
oily or thinned paint.) When the paint
is mixed with cold wax medium the wax equalizes the ratios of paint and oil
that necessitate this rule. Finally, the wax gives a soft matte finish to the painting,
but one which may be buffed to a low sheen.
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| Test tiles for painting with cold wax and oil. See below for explanation |
The medium
provides great freedom of expression. There
are frontiers to explore: new objects to
use as tools for mark-making, new ways to create textures, and new mixed media
techniques (collage) to bring more excitement and interest to my work.
I made a few
test tiles and here are some of my early test explorations above: left: palette knife and embedded tissue collage; top center: stencil first then sgraffito marks into wet paint; top right: sgraffito only; bottom center: sgraffito very pronounced; far right bottom: two layers of stencil
Think “Madame Tussaud”, anything’s possible!
And that’s
the buzz about beeswax. Thank you little worker honey bees!
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