Gamblin Cold Wax Medium

Gamblin Cold Wax Medium is a dense paste excellent for creating a variety of textures within a painting. It has a “short” characteristic and gives a clean break off of a brush or palette knife, retaining the sharp peaks of impasto. These working properties allow for expressive brush marks and the ability to carve into paint layers with palette knives.

Cold Wax also gives oil colors a beautiful translucent quality, similar to the 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!

Gamblin Cold Wax Medium is a mixture of natural beeswax (wax pastilles), Gamsol, and a small amount of alkyd resin. The term “cold” in Cold Wax Medium refers to the fact that heat is not required for working with this wax medium. 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.