Watercolor Wax Batik-Beginning turtle

 Watercolor Wax Batik

Before starting any picture, make a "map" of when you will put wax on what space.

Just make a small copy of your drawing.  (about 5 inches) Use colored pencils or markers. I use white to indicate my first wax, which will end up as white. Yellow indicates what I will mask second, and will be my lightest value after white. Green might be my 3rd wax, and red a 4th wax, and so on. With this simple picture there are only 4.

Trace your full size picture with pencil onto the rice paper. No light box needed: the rice paper is pretty transparent. Make sure you can see your pencil marks. As you go along, you might need to redraw your pencil marks, as the water and paint disintegrate the pencil.

Prepare your wax. Melt it at about 140 degrees....you do not want a high temp.

Lay your rice paper drawing over the WAXY side of BUTCHER PAPER. This keeps the wax from sticking to your paper and protects your surface.

Wax off the parts you want WHITE.

Turn your wax paper to the PAPERY side. That is to absorb the paint. Now paint everything a light value. If you want a certain area a certain color, you can paint it that, but what matters is that any and all colors you paint are a very light value. (or up to the lightest value that you want to keep)

Dry. (I use a box fan) Don't lift the wet rice paper off the butcher paper until it is dry. I use the under paper to carry it to the box fan or place to dry. It is very fragile when wet. 

Turn your butcher paper to the waxy side. Next wax off everything you want to keep the lightest value. Here I waxed off the head, flippers, and part of the shell, leaving the eyes unwaxed and anything that will be darker. Flip to your paper side. Then I painted up to the second value. You can put in the colors you want but it's more fun to just paint values.

Now that the flippers are the value I want, I wax those and part of the that I want to stay that value. I also SPATTER some more) Then I paint everything the next values.

I wax off everything that I want to keep--the sections on the shell, and paint again, the next values up.

Now I have all my value. I wax over everything.

When the wax cools, I crackle it. Brush the excess crumbs away. Then with black paint (Or other dark color) I brush with a stiff brush into the cracks. You can pick and choose to cover a lot, a little or not at all.

I glued a white sheet of paper and carefully glued the picture to the white paper. Any rips in the rice paper can easily be covered over with scraps or can just become part of the picture.

(If I'm doing a picture for framing or selling, I use YES GLUE or mat gel. But just for fun, you can use Elmers. It's just not archival.)

Once the paper is dry, you can make repairs, corrections and changes because it is no longer so fragile. I try to use watercolor first to not alter the look. But you can use white gel pen, posca pen, inktense, watercolor pencils, etc.

See other blogs: 

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