How Do You Use Cold Wax in Oil Painting?

 Cold wax oil painting

Cold wax oil painting is an oil painting technique that involves combining a buttery soft paste of beeswax with a small amount of solvent and resin, which is then mixed with oil paint on the palette to create a painting.

Cold wax is typically used to add body, transparency, and depth to oil paint. It also reduces drying time and improves paint workability. Cold wax oil painting is safe because the cold wax eliminates the need for encaustic ventilation.

Cold wax oil painting is exciting and compelling to many artists because the wax easily combines with other mediums such as dry pigment, powdered charcoal, marble dust, chalk pastel, graphite, and oil sticks. It's popular because of how well it works as a medium for creating sturdy layering.

Using cold wax in oil paintings

To use cold wax in your oil painting, squeeze out the oil paint and splotch a generous blob of the wax paste onto a glass palette to use cold wax in your oil painting.

Mix the wax into the oil paint, adjusting the proportion of wax to achieve the desired level of transparency. You could add marble dust to the mixture to give it more body and texture. When this is completed, it is time to apply the cold wax paint!

Applying cold wax oil paint is one of the exciting cold wax techniques for many painters. To apply the cold wax oil paint, you can use squeezes, trowels, scrapers, painting knives, old credit cards, icing spreaders, brayers, rollers, and silicone-bladed painting tools, among other things. The paint will have a creamy, buttery texture that allows it to spread and layer beautifully.

Following the application of the cold wax oil paint, you will move on to the most enjoyable part of the process and one of the most exciting cold wax oil painting techniques – mark making.

Anything goes here! To mark the wax, you can use plastic wrap, paper, pencils, pine needles, and other materials. You can use oil sticks, wax crayons, waxed paper, and other items to make marks. The key here is to be as creative and open to your imagination as possible.

The drying process is the next step in your cold wax oil painting project. You will discover that the wax reacts differently to manipulation throughout this process. You can scrap it away after it has been set up a little to reveal an interesting history of color and texture beneath.

Cold wax oil painting training

For more information about using cold wax in oil painting, check out the online color and design art school for comprehensive training on cold wax painting for beginners.

This training will introduce you to a variety of concepts, such as cold wax abstract paintings; color mixing, which demonstrates the true magic of mixing your colors to achieve endless color variations and transform colors you don't like into colors you do; and cold wax oil painting techniques such as brayers, silicone tools, drippy paint, masking, RF, pigment sticks, dry mark-making, glazing, and so on.

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