Video: How to Make Wax for Encaustic Painting

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How to prepare your wax for making your painting by using a muffin pan; learn this and more in this free online art lesson about encaustic wax painting and its uses taught by expert John Vanderbrooke.

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Video Transcript

Some artists prefer to make their own waxes and I would say probably it is the traditional encaustic painter that does this. And to do that, you have to get a hold of purified beeswax to start with and then you melt that in pots. Usually on a pancake griddle like this, they'll have several pots set up. Sometimes people will use muffin tins bigger than this, but muffin tins to put their different pots of wax melting and then they will add Dammar crystals; it comes in almost rock form and you have to get a hammer and smash it on a piece of concrete to get it in powdered form, mix it in with your wax, and then a coloring agent of some kind. You could use oil paints if you wanted to for coloring or dry pigments. If you use an oil paint like right out the tube, an oil paint, you'd have to set it out on some--oh, like a paper towel overnight to get all the oil out of it first so that you don't scrape the color in without all the oil. Now, this is expensive because wax in large quantities can run quite a bit of money. If you were buying it already colored for the traditional person, these sample blocks--oh a set of seven are probably $40 to $50, and if you get one color, that's the way I've sold it, almost like a bar of soap, about that big, you might pay $20 to $50 a color. So that gets pretty expensive and I found that it was much too much trouble because the method I use is just this small block it's all that's needed because we don't use much wax; we put on about a very thin coat.

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How to Make Wax for Encaustic Painting

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