Workshop: Virginia Whiting - Cold Wax Techniques

A wonderfully messy, experimental, highly enjoyable workshop with Virginia Whiting!

We arrived, as instructed, with six small pieces of oil/acrylic paper taped to a drawing board and a collection of items useful for making textures in the paint.

Ginny began by sharing some slides of artwork by both abstract and figurative artists to show the range of effects that could be achieved. She explained we could only scratch the surface of available techniques in one morning, as so much of the colour intensity and richness of texture and pattern could only be obtained by applying a succession of layers and allowing them to dry over time. However, the techniques that could be practised using wet in wet were enough to act as a starting point for experimentation.

She showed how to mix the wax with the oil paint and explained that different effects could be obtained by varying the percentage of wax to oil paint, along with selecting colours of different transparency. Once the paint was spread across the surface of the paper, it could be squeegeed, scratched, blended, squashed to obtain the various effects.

We had a fabulous time. We mixed the paint with blobs of wax and spread it over the paper like butter. and then we proceeded to scratch with bits of twig, brush ends, screwdrivers, the ends of clips and bottle tops, then spread some more paint and pressed stencils, netting, doilies, decorators’ rollers and tilers’ grout spreaders and so on and so forth. And then we applied some more paint and did it again…