Cold Wax Medium — Properties, Possibilities and the Painted Surface

Cold wax medium offers painters a distinctive set of properties that are difficult to replicate through other means. It extends and adds body to oil paint, aids drying time, improves transparency and workability, and allows for the creation of textured effects and layers without requiring specialist equipment or ventilation. The painting 'Through the Trees' exemplifies many of these qualities, and the notes below draw on that work to explore what the medium makes possible.

If you’d like to see how these cold-wax techniques resolve in finished paintings, you can view selected works here.

'Through The Trees' Oil & Cold Wax on Canvas 91 x 91 x 4 cm

Surface and Impasto

The forest series has been devoted to creating textural variation through the development of a rich impasto surface. Paint is layered, carved, and incised to convey movement, energy, and the physical presence of the landscape. The cold wax medium is central to this process: it gives the paint a body and workability that allows it to be built up into substantial relief, and it dries with a solidity that holds the marks made in it with considerable fidelity.

'Through The Trees' Close-up of surface texture

Drying Time and Translucency

Incorporating cold wax medium into oil paint significantly reduces drying time, allowing for minimal waiting between layer applications and enabling continuous work as ideas evolve. This speed of working is one of the medium's most practical advantages, and it changes the character of the painting process — making it more immediate, more responsive, and more open to the kind of accumulation and revision that produces complex surfaces.

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. Translucent layers over opaque ones create a depth that is both visual and physical.

'Through The Trees' Oil & Cold Wax (Detail)

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 precision. The result depends on the thickness of the wax layers beneath — a thin layer yields a fine, delicate line; a thick impasto produces a broader, more sculptural groove. This technique of drawing into the dried surface introduces a quality of mark that is quite different from anything achievable with a brush or knife on wet paint.

'Through The Trees' Oil & Cold Wax (Detail)

Palette Knives and Tools

A palette knife allows cold wax pigment to be applied in a sculptural way that is central to the character of the medium. 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. I use a range of knives of different sizes and profiles, each producing a distinct quality of mark. Brayers, sponges, scrapers, and card are also part of the toolkit — each engaging with the material in a different way and producing different qualities of surface.

'Through The Trees' Oil & Cold Wax on Canvas (Detail)

Finding the Right Note

When working with tonal, textural, and colour contrasts between forms and their backgrounds, I use a method akin to visual tuning. The process involves adjusting relationships — between colour and tone, between texture and flatness, between the painted and the unpainted — until the painting resolves into something that feels right. It is not always easy to describe, but it is unmistakable when it happens. The medium, with its particular combination of physical presence and optical subtlety, makes this kind of fine adjustment both possible and necessary.

'Through The Trees' in a room setting