Working with Oil Paint and Cold Wax — Notes from the Studio
- peter corr
- Jan 10, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: May 25
Cold wax is a medium used in combination with oil paint. It consists primarily of beeswax, with a small amount of solvent to soften it and additional ingredients to assist drying. At room temperature it has a soft, paste-like texture and dries to a matte finish. Unlike encaustic techniques, no heat is required — the wax remains workable at room temperature and is applied directly to the painting surface. These notes draw on my current painting, 'Der Wald', which brings together many of the techniques I use regularly.
What Cold Wax Does
Wax provides numerous advantages to painters: it extends and adds body to oil paint, reduces drying time, improves transparency and workability, and allows for the creation of textured effects and layers without requiring a special setup or ventilation. The combination of oil paint and cold wax produces a surface of considerable richness — one that can be built up, scraped back, incised, and burnished to achieve a wide range of effects.
The opacity of paint layers can be modified by incorporating cold wax. Oil pigments range from very transparent to somewhat opaque, and the cold wax medium accentuates these characteristics, facilitating the use of matte, satin, and high-gloss finishes within a single painting. This range of surface quality is one of the most distinctive features of the medium.
Drying Time and Layering
Incorporating cold wax medium into oil paint significantly reduces drying time, which offers considerable practical benefits. It allows for minimal waiting between layer applications, enabling continuous work as ideas and responses to the painting evolve. Completing a painting in a single session becomes feasible, though the most interesting surfaces tend to develop over multiple sessions, with each layer responding to and modifying what lies beneath.
Mark-Making and Incision
Allowing the wax to dry for several hours makes it possible to etch into the surface, preserving incisions and marks with considerable precision. The result of this drawing or inscribing depends on the thickness of the wax layers beneath — a thin layer will yield a fine, delicate line; a thick impasto will produce a broader, more sculptural groove. This technique of mark-making brings the canvas surface to life in ways that brushwork alone cannot achieve.
Palette Knives and Application
A palette knife allows cold wax pigment to be applied in a sculptural way that is central to the character of the medium. If texture is the aim, a palette knife is essential — it can be used to build up impasto, to scrape back, to drag and smear, and to create the kind of layered, worked surface that defines this approach to painting. I use a range of knives of different sizes and profiles, each producing a distinct quality of mark.
Although brushes can be used with cold wax, the medium's particular qualities are best exploited through tools that engage more directly with the physical substance of the paint: knives, brayers, sponges, scrapers, and card. The hand is always close to the surface, and the physical engagement of making is central to the experience.
Finding the Right Balance
When working with tonal, textural, and colour contrasts between forms and their backgrounds, I use a method akin to visual tuning. If you play a stringed instrument, you will recognise the process of adjusting pitch until the note rings true. In painting, the equivalent is the moment when the relationships between elements — colour, tone, texture, scale — resolve into something that feels right. It is not always easy to describe, but it is unmistakable when it happens.
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