Level 2 - Scratching the Surface and Beyond with Cold Wax Medium

1. Scratching The Surface with Cold Wax Medium: Hi and welcome to Scratching the Surface and Beyond with Cold Wax Medium. I'm BJ Lance, a cold wax artist known for my love of trees, ethereal landscapes, richly textured surfaces, and nuance pallets. You can see my work and find links to galleries where you can view my work in person at bjlance.com. This Level 2 class builds on the basic skills that you learned in my Level 1 class, Getting Started with Cold Wax Medium. Unless you're already familiar with working with cold wax medium, I suggest you take the Level 1 class first. I'll put a link to that in the notes section. In this Level 2 class, I'll demonstrate how to mix what I call a married and varied pallet, as well as explain the differences between the two most popular whites. I'll suggest and demonstrate alternate types of brayers. I'll suggest a wide range of mark-making tools and materials that go well beyond the basics, and I'll demonstrate working with many of those tools. All these will have you inspired to find your own mark-making tools and get to work. Don't forget, we are still playing, we're still learning, we're still experimenting, and we're still not getting pressures. This is where it gets fun. I'm excited. Let's get started. 2. Palette - Whites: All right, let's mix up a palette. Today, I'm going to show you how I go about mixing up a pallet to get started on the next phase of my painting. But before we do, a word about whites. Somebody, not me, could do a whole class on whites because there are so many of them and there's so many different properties to them. But we're not going to take the time to do that today. But I will touch on the two most popular whites, titanium white and zinc white. Titanium white, which is the one I use the most, is one of the brightest and most opaque whites and has the highest tinting strength. This means when I mix it with a color, it creates more of a pastel of the color, and makes transparent colors more opaque. Here I'm going to squeeze out some titanium white. I wish I could tell you exactly how much to squeeze out. But as I mentioned in the level 1 class, it's always best to start with a 50,50 or one-to-one mix of paint wax. If you squeeze out a teaspoon of paint, add a teaspoon of wax to get started. Add more wax if you need to, in order to get to that cake-frosting like consistency. [MUSIC] Let's see what happens when we add a phthalo blue. This is a very strong transparent color, so I'm just going to use a tiny dab. It doesn't take much, little dab will do here. See how it turns pastel [MUSIC]. Now, zinc white is more transparent. The transparency of this white is useful when you wish to lighten transparent colors without losing too much of their transparency, which makes it good for creating glazes. See the difference. After we do that, I'll show you how it looks over another color on a painting so you can get a better idea of the difference [MUSIC]. See how the color is lighter but not as pastel. This is the zinc white. See how you can see through it to the colors below. It's more transparent. This is the titanium white. See how it's opaque, covering up what's beneath it. In a nutshell, that's the two most popular whites. Gambling website has very handy chart with all the differences between different whites and explaining all the different properties, and it's very handy. I will definitely put a link to that in the notes section. 3. Palette - Color: Now that we understand our whites, we can mix up some color. I like to have a variety of colors to choose from while I'm working, so I create what I call a married and varied palette and you'll find out what I mean by that in a minute. I also mix up a few accent colors. But usually I wait until I've been painting for a while to mix up those accent colors because I sometimes don't know what they're going to be until I get to that point, but for the sake of this demonstration, I'll mix them up now. I wish I could tell you that I put a lot of thought into what colors I choose, but I realized as I was planning this section of the class, that it's more of an intuitive process for me. I think that if the painting I want to work on is lighter, I will mix up a darker palette, if the painting I am working on is already dark, I'm going to mix up a lighter palette, if it's somewhere in the middle, I could go either way. I've got my pile of titanium white that I mixed up earlier. Let's put some color down. I'm going to start with Prussian blue and some light-blue and some pthalo green. Now I'm not going to mix up a lot of paint right now because I'm just working on some small little demo panels at the moment, but if I were working on a larger painting, I would be mixing up more paint, maybe double or even triple depending on the size of the panel of the amount of paint that I'm mixing up right now. Now I'm going to take some of the white and mix it with the pthalo green, pthalo green like the pthalo blue is a strong transparent color. I'm going to start with a little dab and keep mixing it and see how I like the strength of it. Let's get a little stronger here. Throw in a little more white in there Get a little stronger than maybe I really wanted it. As you can see, even adding that little bit of pthalo made the mixture a little bit soupy, so I'm going to add a little more wax to bring me back to that cake frosting-like consistency that I like. Now let's take a little bit of the color mixture and we'll grab a little more and make it a darker version, so that I have a little more variation here. Even that little bit of paint made it a little soupy than I like, and so I'm going to add a little more wax and it's is perfectly okay to do that there's no exact science to mixing paint. Let me take a little bit of the light blue and I'm going to mix it with some Prussian blue let's see the color we get going here. Then take a little bit of my pthalo green and white and a little bit of the light blue and mix that together. See how taking these little bits of colors from each of the piles and mixing them together and taking a little bit from that mixture and mixing it with another of your mixture it makes variations of color based on the colors that you started with. It really does marry the palette together because they're all made up of the same base. Another way that you marry these colors together is once you get all the colors mixed up, you take a little bit from each one and mix them together, then take a little bit of that mixture and you mix it back into every other color on your palette. You've effectively married all your colors on your palette together and you've made the colors just a little more sophisticated. This is one of the little palette secrets is I like to mix it in a little bit of metallic paint. This is silver from Artists law which I get inexpensively at Michael's, and I'm going to wipe up this oil because I don't want it to get mixed in my paint and I am going to mix this together with some of the Prussian blue to make a yummiest metallic color. When you use these paints with the metallic in the mixture on your painting, it gives us this luminosity and I can't even really show it to you which on camera it's something that you can only see with the naked eye, and also sometimes you're not even aware that there's metallic in it, it just gives the painting a luminosity. Once again adding all the extra paint, especially that knew him with all the oil in it makes it a little soupy so we need to add a little more wax. Now I'm going to take some of that and I'm going to mix it up with some of the other colors on the palette again just to have a varied and married palette. I don't like my white to be just stark- white, so I tend to take a little bit of color off of my palette, and mix it into the white just to knock it back off of the bright white. Now that we have our married and varied palate, we can mix up our accent colors. I'm going to mix up my favorite [inaudible] transparent colors. Since our married and varied palette was predominantly lighter, we will go with a darker palette. I'm going to start with transparent gamblin green gold and the always yummy Sinhalese Chinese orange one of my favorites Finally the bold gamblin asphaltum. This is a super-strong duo, and so you don't need a whole lot of that. In fact I probably get just a little more than one-to-one on the wax here. But I think we did pretty good , we'll leave that stand. I think I went a little past the one-to-one on the Chinese orange, so I think I'm going to put a little more paint because I like this color to be just a little richer. Mixing paint is not an exact science, and sometimes you have to add a little more paint, sometimes you have to add a little more wax to get to that cake frosting consistency. Every color and brand is different, it's just something you learn the more you work with the wax and different paints you will get a feel for this I promise. By the way, I will put links to all the paints I've used here in the notes section. To start your class project for this class, start by mixing up your own palette. You can either mix up something similar to what I've mixed up, or you can do your own unique palette. Either way, I'd love to see them, why not post a picture in your projects section. 4. Alternate Brayers: Real quick, before we jump into all those fun mark making tools, let's just take a moment to touch on more brayer options. In the level 1 class, I showed you the speed ball rubber brayer, which I myself do use more often than other brayers but as with anything else, you should try all the different options to see which one you like best. Because not only are there so many different types of Brayers, all these different brayers lay the paint and the wax down a little bit different from each other, so it's fun to explore all the different options. One of my favorites is this old wooden wallpaper seam roller. I picked it up in a thrift store and of course I thought, "I wonder what this'll do," and I brought it back to the studio. It does lay down more of a random mark. It's a little bit rougher, and I like that, especially when you use it over a very textured surface that's a little more dried. This set of brayers is German, and I found them on a website that mostly seems to cater to various types of printmaking. I will include a link in the notes section. The barrel of these brayers are larger than most of the other brayers were using, so it takes a little more rolling on the palate to get them covered with paint. I think they're fun because they make different width marks. These are very inexpensive at the Dollar Store, I think there are two to a pack for $1, they're foam, they're spongy. They lay down a much more textural soft surface than the soft rubber brayer, which lays down a much more smooth surface. I am not above picking up furniture wheels when I find them in thrift stores just to see what they do, they're fun to experiment with, they definitely lay down some very random marks. So there are some fun brayer options to play with. Now let's get to those mark making tools. 5. Mark-Making Tools & Demos: All right. Let's get started looking at those mark making tools. You can probably find a lot of these in thrift stores, garage sales, the Dollar Store, or even around your own house. By the time we're done, everything you see, you're going to wonder what kind of mark would that make. To be honest, I still think that even after all these years of painting, every time I run across something a little different, I wonder, but I don't buy as many of those things as I used to because I have quite a collection as you'll see, and I do gravitate towards my favorites and you will too, but you won't know what they are until you experiment with a wide variety of different things. So let's get started. These are what I call my zingy tools, and they're probably my favorites. Their pattern tracers used in sewing, as well as some pastry tools. I never passed these up in a thrift store, obviously, and I'll show you what they do in a minute. Next step, are a variety of rubber mats for the bathtub, silicone tributes, and pot holders. When I was out and about the other day, I snapped some photos of these floor mats, as well as these bath mats, both in a discount store. The silicone tributes I saw at the grocery store, and with things like this, I tend to cut the straight lip off the edge so it's not part of the impression. This piece is one that we started in the level 1 class. It's been about three weeks since I did this. At this point it's pretty dry. Nothing's coming off on my hands. What I want to show you here is that if we were to take this silicone ice tray, it's for making ice cubes for water bottles, go figure. If I were trying to make an impression with that, nothing would happen because the paint is very dry. However, if I were to take this rubber mat that has some pain on it and try to impress it on the dry surface and the paint in the mat is dry, not wet. If I were to impress it upon the dry surface, it might transfer off some of that dry paint. I like that. It creates some random texture. I like it. Now, while making an impression with something like the ice tray won't work. However, my favorite zingy tools, these will absolutely mark into a dry surface. You might not be able to see all the marks they made, but once we go over with another color, these lines will show up for sure. I'm just going to grab my paper example and show you a little more of those zingy lines. Now, I'm going to grab that bumpy rubber mat again, impress it into this thin damp layer. See the difference than when we just transferred off the dry paint onto the dry surface. You can also transfer off the wet paint. This is a piece of rubber bath mat with acute raised design on it. Let's just grab this piece to demonstrate. I put this thin layer of blue paint on about an hour ago, so it's tacky now. The other side has little suction cups that work as well, but be careful they will suction to the panel. I'm just going to take my brayer and lightly apply some color over the surface just to show you how some of the impressions really come to life when you add a contrasting color. See the zingy lines and other marks appearing like magic? Now, we'll look at rubber or silicone ice trays, molds, and textural rollers. These are a few of mine, but recently I snapped some pics of other ideas while I was out and about. I found a load of items in the cake and candy making sections of the craft store. These are fondant molds, chocolate molds, pattern sheets to make impressions on fondant, more fondant molds. I also found a texture sheet for making impressions and polymer clay, and these little squares are for making impressions and so, and of course there are just loads of textural paint rollers out there. These are fondant rollers and as I said, I don't buy many new items these days, but I gave in and bought one. So I'm going to try that out for the first time here. This is one of my favorites as well. It's an ice tray. I've seen these in the grocery store or Ace Hardware and the bottoms are flexible. I'm impressing it into a thin damp layer paint. You can also transfer the paint it picks up, back down if you so please. I'm just laying down a fresh, thin damp layer of paint wax to try out the fondant roller. If I go too fast, it skips across the surface. Let's see what happens if I go slower. Much better. Now, let's take that same ice tray from our dry surface example and see what happens when we impress it into a slightly damp layer. It makes a mark and as with the others, we can transfer the paint off from it. This is just part of my collection of random items. I also snap pics of things I saw while out and about the other day to give you a little more inspiration. This is a metal spongy thing, a pop cleaner. I got it at the Dollar Store and it'll make some nice scratches that are hard to see on this dry surface. This surface is more on the tacky side, maybe an hour or so old. So it'll take more paint off to reveal underneath. On this panel, I put a layer of paint on about an hour or so ago. So it's more on the tacky side. This is ball chain and you can just lay it down and brayer over it. I'm using some pressure here. How fun is that? How about a color? Let's see what that does. See how it pulled up the surface? Again, just laying down a fresh light layer. Let's see what happens when we put some rubber bands down here. I just scattered them around like so and generally I'll just take a piece of paper and lay it on top and brayer over that, and that makes a fun transfer doesn't. Now, let's just pick up our rubber bands. See the random marks it makes. Both pulling up the paint as well as leaving some impressions that will show when you add another color overhead. This is a coaster, just applying some pressure, leaving some lines. This is drywall tape, I think. The back is slightly sticky so it will stay in place easily. It's hard to see the impression it makes here. So let's do it on a thin damp layer. There we go. You can also use this as a stencil. For instance, let's take a little paint with one of our color shapers more about those later and just pull some paint across it, and then remove it, voila. I would let this dry for a little bit before rolling anything over it or you'll just obliterate it because it's still wet. Paper and textiles such as tissue paper, cheese, cloth, placemats, tool, as well as textured scrapbook papers are just some of the papers in textiles you can experiment with. I'm just going to lay down a contrasting layer of white here. See how some of those hidden lines are coming alive. This is a piece of dish cloth. I'm pressing it in and applying a little pressure here. Nice. Now, crumple up some tissue paper. Press it in to the surface. We're just going to grab our brayer and apply a little pressure and just pull it off. See the lovely texture it creates. Again, just laying down a fresh, thin damp layer. This is roll is streamers like you put up better paddy as a decoration. I bought it at the Dollar Store. We're just going to tear some off, and impress it into the surface, apply some pressure with our brier. I know it's a little hard to see here, but again, that texture will show up later once it's dried a little bit, and you go over it with another color, just like you've seen with some of the other marks we've demonstrated here. This is tool. You can use it to lightly wipe over a damp surface. You can scrape it if the paint's a little tackier. You can also use it to impress into the surface and make marks with. These are textured scrapbook papers and some corrugated cardboard. If you don't have any scraps of corrugated cardboard hanging around, you can buy sheets of it as well in the scrapbook paper aisle. Let's just press it into the paint making marks. This scrapbook paper has little raised dots on it, and this thin layer is tacky, maybe about 20 minutes old. We're just going to apply some pressure either with our hand, or the brier or both. See the lovely dots it made. These tools you'll likely have to purchase online or at a craft store because I've never seen them at a thrift store, damn it. I will put links in the notes section for them. These are color shapers and they come in all different shapes and sizes and varying degrees of flexibility. These tools are for working with clay, and honestly, I only use a few of these and you can probably tell which ones those are. To that end, this is one of my favorites. You can scrape with it, draw with it. You can scrape lightly or dig deep. This is a Kemper whiteout tool. It's a little different than the color shapers I'm going to show you in the sense that it's much stiffer, it's much harder, and it's not as springy and flexible as these are. See how springy these are, and this is not, much harder. You can use it to scrape paint off, or use it to scribble or draw. This is a wide color shaper. You can use it like a brush to paint with. Don't forget, we're not getting precious here, we're still playing. You can even use this to scrape paint off if you wish. Well, let's go back to our paper example and I'm just going to add a somewhat thicker layer of paint here. As I mentioned in level one class, it's easier to clean your tools while they're still wet, so just wipe them off. Color shapers are fun to wipe off paint with to reveal what's underneath. I have a basket full of different thicknesses of string, ribbons, thread, and wire, I even have dental flaws. This surface is tacky. Let's lay down the string, and I'm applying some pressure here. Nice. This is a thinner string. I bought it at Thrift store. My grandmother used this to crochet tablecloths with. Doing the same thing, laying it down, applying some pressure. Another thing I never pass up at a Thrift store is a brush. Sometimes I use them like this to create a pebble like texture, or I use it like a brush, sweeping it across, making scratchy lines, and sometimes I'll go over a different surface and let the paint on the brush come off. But if I don't want that and I want to clean the brush, I'll scrape it against a concrete curb or against some rough sidewalk. Just be sure to do it somewhere. It doesn't matter because the paint might stick around for a while. Let's see again that texture coming to life. I love it. Now I'm going to give you a little tease of the level three class, and grab my gum salt solvent. It's going to spritz of very light bit onto the surface, and you can see from the over spray dots on the table how lightly I've sprayed. Then we're going to let it sit for just a little bit, load some paint on the brier, and go back over it. Look what's happening. See all the dots where the solvent was, very cool. I promise in level three we'll look closer at different ways to use solvent, fun stuff. I'm looking forward to it. Just as a note, here, we've worked with dry surfaces, thin damped surfaces and tacky slightly dry surfaces, not thick wet layers. If you're having problems getting good marks from some things, it could be you're trying to work with either too dry, or too wet surface depending on the tool. See how the tools are just making a mushing mess of this thick wet surface. 6. Class Project: For your project, in addition to mixing up a palette, I'd like you to look around your house and see what you can find to make marks with. If you have time, visit the hardware store or the thrift store or the craft store, or anywhere else that you can think of. See if you can find something that I haven't found, be creative. Please snap a photograph of it and show it in the project section, I'm sure other students would like to see as well. Also snap pictures of the favorite marks that you made, we'd love to see those too.I hope this class has given you all kinds of inspiration for making marks in your cold wax paintings. Just remember, we're still playing, we're still having fun, we're still experimenting and we're still not being precious. We're creating a richly textured, deep surface for our paintings. In my next class, level 3, digging deeper into working with cold wax medium, we'll explore more media to use with our paintings, such as pigment sticks, inks, pigment powders, Pampas cells, just to name a few. When I teased you a little bit today with that spritz of solvent and I promise we'll go even deeper into solvents there. I'll see you all in level 3. Don't forget to follow me here on SkillShare. If you liked this class, give it a thumbs up, even better, give it a nice review. You can also follow me on Instagram @BJLantzStudio. 7. Bonus - Studio Tips: In the level one class I had shown you invisible glove that I use for easier clean up on my hands, but I didn't show you how much. So I'm going to do that now. Just a small amount is more than enough. Just spread it around your hands, let it dry and you're good to go. This dude is called a tube bringer and it is great for squeezing every last bit out of a tube of paint. Totally worth the $9 and change on Dick Blick. I'll put a link in the notes section of course. I even bought an extra one to keep in the bathroom for toothpaste and hand cream. These are my paint color cheat sheets. I bought clipboards at the Dollar Store, one for each color grouping blues, greens, yellows, etc. I hung them on peg board for easy reference. I put a little smear of colors straight from the tube, both thick and thin on the form I made up, noting both the color name and the brand. On a separate page on the appropriate color board. I also smear colors I've mixed making notes about what colors I use to get there. These have proven very useful and I refer to them often. I'll include a blank copy of that form I use in the notes section in case you want to make some too. 8. Bonus - Watch Me Paint: When I attend a workshop or a class, something I really enjoy is just watching the instructor paint. As an extra added bonus, I've included here some extra demonstration clips. I hope you will enjoyed them.