New Sketches: COVID-19 Vaccine Shot

I finally got my COVID-19 vaccine shot yesterday, the first of two doses. After getting it, I was told to wait for them to see if I had any side effects, so while waiting I made a couple sketches. There were nurses walking around asking us how we were feeling, and chatting us up to keep us calm and relaxed. No problems for me.

Painting with Gouache and Cold Wax

Today I wanted to play around a bit with the mixed media of gouache paint and cold wax that I wrote about in the previous post. I wound up with this small landscape of grass and sky, nothing to get too excited about, but it was a fun exercise. The main goal was to learn more about the medium, and try out different tools.

The surface is one of my water putty panels that I wrote about making awhile back. It’s about 7.5 inches square. It has a light tan color that you can still see at the top of the image. I used several different tools to apply the paint: a small brush, a plastic paint knife, and different sizes of silicone tipped “colour shapers.” Those shapers worked very well with this media. I used the 2inch size on the blue sky, and the initial lay-in of the ground, and got much of the texture lines with the smaller ones. I didn’t use any alkyd medium that I wrote about last time to make the paint more fluid, just used paint and cold wax (Gamblin’s brand.)

I found that if I mixed a little of the wax into the dab of paint as soon as I placed it on my palette it would keep the paint workable through the whole session, otherwise the gouache would dry too quickly. While I could add water to keep the paint wet, that wouldn’t react well with the wax. Wax is not fluid in this mixture. I can make it that way with an alkyd medium, like Liquin or Galkyd, but that makes it more transparent. In this way, it’s challenging to get a curved edge that is sharp and opaque. I can, however, make a sharp edge by scraping or incising into the layer with a knife or scraper, and then paint into that removed area. I also discovered that the thinner scraped areas, such as in the blue sky, would harden rather quickly (about an hour,) whereas any thicker areas would take much longer. Adding a new layer over those harder areas would not pick up any paint underneath unless I used more pressure.

I’d like to try this with something more representational, like a portrait, and maybe add in some oil pastels.

Mixing Gouache Paint with Cold Wax

I’m finally back with a new post. This one has to do with combining two or three mediums in a manner not commonly though of : gouache paint, cold wax, and alkyd medium. Gouache, as you likely know, is an opaque watercolor paint that uses gum arabic as its binder. Cold wax is a wax paste typically made with just beeswax; although, some other waxes may also be added. The alkyd medium I’m demonstrating here is Winsor & Newton’s Liquin. Gamblin also sells a similar medium called Galkyd.

The most common advice given when painting with gouache is you should never allow the paint to get too thick, since the binder cannot support any more than a few thin layers. This is important advice if you’re using just paint; however, like many art rules there are ways around them. In this case you can add the paint to the cold wax to increase the thickness. I should mention that this is also possible by adding acrylic pastes or gels to gouache. (NOTE: see update below) The benefit that wax offers is that once it hardens you can scrape back into the layers to achieve interesting effects or textures that can’t be done in dry acrylic. Acrylic will dry fast, whereas the wax will take several hours to harden before it is stiff enough to add another layer, which can be an advantage if you’re working at a large size.

For this demonstration I used Gamblin’s Cold Wax Medium. It’s made with beeswax, their mineral spirit solvent called “Gamsol”, and Galkyd. There are other brands on the market as well. It’s also not too difficult to make it yourself from raw materials. Some brands use damar crystals as the resin instead of alkyd. Some also use turpentine as the solvent instead of mineral spirits. Dorland’s Cold Wax adds paraffin and microcrystalline wax along with beeswax, and it has been the smoothest brand I’ve tested. To make cold wax myself, I’ve used 11 parts melted wax, 1 part alkyd resin, and 11 parts spirits. Add more or less of each to adjust the consistency to your liking.

In application, I mix in equal amounts of paint to wax. For more transparent pigments, such as most yellows, you’ll likely want to use less wax, but I would recommend keeping the amount above @ 25%. The more gouache paint you have in your mix, the thinner your layer should be. All of your paint layers should have at least 25% or more wax, since the water content of gouache will not allow it to adhere to the waxy surface without that.

In the image above you can see how thick the paint and wax mixture is. The blue swatch on the left was laid down on this illustration board surface using a brush. I smoothed it out some by rubbing it with a paper towel. This thin layer took about 4 hours until the wax was hard enough to paint over. For the pink layer on top of it I first diluted the paint some with water, and when mixed in the wax, the water caused a sort of resist where the paint bubbled up in an interesting texture. The blue swatch on the right was applied with a paint knife, much thicker as you can see. This took about twice as long to harden as the other swatch. The yellow ochre was applied with paint that had been thinned more with Liquin, and I was still able to get some thick peaks of paint shown on the right. These Liquin layers also dry slowly, in about a day.

There’s more experimenting to be done with this gouache and wax combination. I should mention that casein paint can be mixed this way, and oil paint, of course. Oil pastels can also be used in combination with this, anything that has a soft wax binder. Acrylic paint I’m unsure about, since I’ve always read that it doesn’t mix properly with wax. I’ve made a successful wax paste by melting the wax and adding borax and no solvent, which I’ve written about before. I should do some more experiments with that as well. There are many cold wax paintings on youtube you may want to browse through if you’re curious.

UPDATE: I sent an email to Gamblin’s Product Specialist to get an official comment about combining their cold wax with gouache paint. Today she replied that she advised against doing this, saying cold wax was specifically designed for use with either oils or alkyd paints. The bonding with gouache would be “limited,” in her opinion and less stable. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work, just not as well. Instead, she recommended using an acrylic heavy gel or paste to get similar results and proper bonding. On that note: where I wrote above that acrylic mediums cannot be carved into, I’ve learned that is not completely true. There is a hard molding paste made by Golden that lets you carve into it; although, not in the same way as you can with a softer wax.