Welcome people who love to play with your beloved medium, oil pastel.

The more I play with it, the more I find the ways to create new paintings with enjoyment. It is really a medium with unlimited possibilities. Aside from drawing and painting, straight or diluted with some kind of solvents, it can be used with some heat sources to fuse it to a support. It’s time for you to relax, have fun, and let the medium do the job.

I had tried to iron the flakes of oil pastels onto some watercolor papers, however, the results I got were blobs of colors around the paper with very few merging together.

 I kept on thinking about how to make it flow and glow until I read about encaustic painting.

Encaustic is a painting process in which pigments are bound in a hot wax mixture and applied to the support with some heat tools. The name comes from the Greek ‘Enkaustikos,’ meaning ‘to burn in.’

Then, there came lots of questions in my mind.

The First one:  How do I mix oil pastel with wax?

To make it wax-colored cubes like commercial encaustic paint set is not suitable for me because I will end up with lots of containers with different colors because it is very difficult to clean up. I don’t have space to keep them as is until the next melting time.

Well, this problem is not difficult to solve. I will show you how in the instruction section.

Second: What kind of wax should be used?

Beeswax, fossil wax, paraffin wax, microcrystalline wax, and others. Wow, there are so many kinds of waxes in this world. They are really confusing.

I first gave the paraffin a try since it is not costly and easy to find. I was very pleased with the result. However, there were cautions that paraffin can cause bloom or hazy look when the temperature changes. This case did not worry me because I stay in a warm climate where there is not much difference from one season to another.  But it has a high shrinkage after setting.

Since ancient time, beeswax had been used so I didn’t miss a chance to try. I was not quite happy with the first result because it did not melt as easily as paraffin nor help spreading the color nicely. I’ve got a lot of color blobs all over the paper. After considering for a while what to do with it, I came up with sky and rows of trees beneath.

Our knowledgeable Sue (Dyin) told me that ‘fossil wax’ will do a good job. Of course, I have read somewhere that the oil pastels have fossil wax as one of the composition so it must be the best mixture. But what is that ‘fossil wax’?

Isn’t it funny that I went to hobby and toy sections in department stores looking for that particular wax. There is nothing to do with it in any fossil-related set but plaster cement only.

Then she gave me this link http://www.waxindia.com . There I found lots of interesting information about different types of waxes.

I laughed to myself when the secret revealed. Fossil wax means a petroleum by-product while beeswax is a kind of natural wax. It’s as easy as that. Paraffin and microcrystalline are examples of the fossil waxes that can be found in candle making craft shop.

Searching the internet, I have not found any formula for mixing different type of waxes for the usage I want to do. Therefore, after studying the different characteristics of each kind of wax, I came up with my own formula that I will share with you.

One point of caution. Since the process is dealing with heat and burnable substances, good care and concentration must be taken whenever the heat is involved.

Materials

1.      White refined or bleached beeswax. It has a melting point of 62C or 146F.

2.      Paraffin wax : Mine is in beads form. It is easily melted (54C or 125F) and spreads oil pastel nicely. However, it is brittle, can crack, chip off and shrink dramatically if used alone.

3.      Microcrystalline wax (Micro wax) : This is a very sticky wax.  Because of its high flexibility this will help the mixture to be more durable since it will not brittle nor break easily. It also prevents blooming.

4.      Wax paper

5.      UV powder : This is claimed to help protect  color from fading.

6.      Iron : I have both big and small to do broad or small tasks.

7.      Pencil sharpener

8.      These are some of my oil pastel treasures

9.      Support : Any rigid, absorbent and heat resistant surface can be used. To me, I like to cover my unsuccessful watercolor pieces. There are two good things about this. Firstly, I have got an immediate underpainting which might nicely show through and incorporate to the new work. Secondly, I do not waste my expensive artist’s grade paper.

10.  Heat safe containers to melt waxes

11.  An aluminum foil sheet or container

Wax Preparation (Approx. 20-30 minutes)

1. My formula for wax mixture is as follows:

            Beeswax                 70%
                      Paraffin                    20%
                      Microcrystalline       10%
                      UV Powder             0.02%

    Melt these waxes together in a container placed in a pot contained with water. I use a laboratory beaker for this task since it can stand high temperature and is easy to pour later. If you wish to make colored wax, your selected color of oil pastels can be put in the wax mixture once it is completely melted.

2. Pour the melted mixture onto a prepared aluminum foil to make a thin wax sheet. The thinner the better.

3. Tear the cool wax sheet into small chips and they are ready to be used.

Creating a Piece of Art (Approx. 30-45 minutes)

1. Use a pencil sharpener to shave the selected oil pastel colors into small pieces. Sprinkle them sparingly all over the support.

2. Tear the wax sheet into small pieces and sprinkle them around as well.

3. Cover the work with a wax sheet. It will help the iron be able to move around with no cleaning needed during the process. Using iron directly on the work is also possible but cleaning is required on every move, or else the work piece will end up with muddy colors.

    Use lowest heat setting on the iron to go slowly over the wax sheet. It takes only a few second to melt the color/wax so take care not to burn it. I found my wax mixture melt much easier and better than using beeswax alone.

    When one place gets a good flow, continue moving to other areas. Be careful about bubble trap, or else that place will not have color/wax adhered.

4. This is after everything has been ironed while the wax sheet is still on top.

5. If you like a flat surface, let the wax cool before peeling off the wax sheet. Peeling when the color/wax is not set will create texture or peel off some color/wax from the support. It depends on your preference. Mine is peeling off immediately after I took the previous photo which takes only a very few seconds and it was already set.

    If you are not happy with any places, they can be redone at just only the spots by shaving some color flakes, putting them on the place. Some wax flakes are needed if the place got a bubble hole. If not, the wax on the support is enough to help spread the new color around. Then cover with a new wax sheet and iron again.

Here is the result after peeling the whole piece of wax sheet off and its closed-ups.

The different oil pastel colors have different melting characteristics. The strong colors with lots of pigment spread and merge better than the ones with lots of white. This is my example of using mostly light colors. There are lots of individual blobs.

From this point, the piece can either be left as is or further painted with oil pastels. This is up to your creativities. 

I firstly planned to use this piece as a background for a close-up flower painting in the pastel forum’s O’Keefe’s project. However, after peeling off the wax sheet, I think it is quite beautiful by itself so I ended up using some oil pastels to highlight and grey down some areas to get this ‘Flame in the Forest’ abstract.

This experiment would only be a starting point for other techniques to further be explored with creativities and fun.

Hope you all enjoy the process and show us your work in the future.

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