Skip to content

GAMBLIN Cold Wax

Original price R 309.00 - Original price R 919.00
Original price
R 309.00
R 309.00 - R 919.00
Current price R 309.00

Cold Wax Medium is made from naturally white, pure beeswax. Formulated to knife consistency, Cold Wax Medium makes oil colours, Gamblin mediums, and Gamvar thicker and more matte. It can also be applied alone as a matte varnish.

What is Cold Wax Painting?

Cold Wax Painting is any type of painting that heavily utilizes Cold Wax Medium into oil colors. In its own way, Cold Wax Painting blurs the line between oil painting and encaustic painting.

What is Cold Wax Medium?

Gamblin Cold Wax Medium a mixture of natural beeswax (wax pastilles), Gamsol and a small amount of alkyd resin. The term “cold” in Cold Wax Medium and Cold Wax Painting refers to the fact that heat is not required for working with this wax medium – as it dries by solvent evaporation (Gamsol), rather than the cooling of the wax, as in encaustic painting. As the Gamsol evaporates out of the medium, the soft wax hardens to the density of a beeswax candle.

Unlike other Gamblin painting mediums, which increase the flow and gloss of oil colors to varying degrees, Cold Wax Medium makes oil colors thicker and more matte.

Cold Wax Painting Techniques

Cold Wax medium is a dense paste, it is excellent in creating a variety of textures within a painting. It has a “short” characteristic and gives a clean break off of the brush or knife, retaining the sharp peaks of impasto. These working properties allow for expressive brushmarks and the ability to carve into paint layers with palette knives. Cold Wax also gives oil colors a beautiful translucent quality, similar to the seductive surfaces of encaustic paintings.

Cold Wax Painting utilizes experimental approaches, including the use of brayers, stencils, and textural elements such as bubble wrap or wire screens. The possibilities are endless!

From the artists who wrote the book on Cold Wax Medium, Jerry McLaughlin & Rebecca Crowell demonstrates some of their Cold Wax Painting techniques in the video below.