An immersion in cold wax and oil painting techniques
A masterclass with artist Sophie Velzian
I have just returned from a wonderful weekend, working with cold wax and oil painter Sophie Velzian, on the edge of the Helford River in Cornwall. It was the first time I had travelled to that part of Cornwall and I was just blown away by the gentle beauty of this sheltered estuarine region.
Sometimes when you discover a new place for the first time you wonder why you haven’t been there before. I am a regular visitor to Cornwall and last year I joined a group called Prime Women Artists, a collective of artists working in the Cornish region.
In a way I’m somewhat of a outsider belonging to the group, but I was welcomed in as I had been friends with Sharon Bruster, who set up Prime with her friend Maggie Cochran as a way of enabling collaborations and developing a supportive network for the many unsung women artists living and working in Cornwall.
Towards the end of 2023, several members of the group decided to work on sketchbook collaborations, and as I have already written about here, I was matched with Sophie Velzian. To be honest I can’t really believe my luck that we were partnered to work on this project. Read more about our sketchbook project here.
Our attitudes to our work are so similar and we both have a very joyful approach to painting. Although we use different mediums and our work is completely unrelated we managed to achieve an incredible synergy in our shared sketchbooks.
I am a mixed media artist working primarily in acrylics and Sophie works in oils using cold wax medium. During our collaboration we posted two sketchbooks by snail mail up and down the M5 between Bristol and Cornwall and worked on the backdrops that we provided for each other. It’s been illuminating to see how the two mediums we both like to use have merged.
Every artist has their own visual vocabulary and that becomes a language that is personal. But to learn new ways of doing things, expanding a visual language enriches the potential to move work forwards in a new direction.
I had never realised that acrylic paint and oil would work together as one is water-based and the other is obviously oil-based, but we discovered that it is possible to work in acrylic on top of oil paint as well as oil on top of acrylic. We knew that many painters already use acrylic as the background layer to establish a composition and sketch out tonal values and then add the oil on top, but to my knowledge, putting acrylic on top of oil is something which isn’t commonly done.
Anyway roll forward a couple of months and I happened to be in Cornwall with my book group for a week so I suggested to Sophie that we get together and paint. She kindly offered to share her techniques and took me on an immersive experience, including swimming in the Helford River, the source of her painting inspiration, in January - luckily she had a wetsuit I could borrow!
I was amazed at Sophie‘s incredible studio. She has a huge purpose built space with beautiful views and her paintings displayed framed and in various stages of progress all around.
The Helford River is particularly beautiful and we also had time to visit the Trebah Garden - a temperate rainforest filled with palms, tree farms and bamboo trees. To say I had arrived in heaven is something of an understatement. We visited the gardens and I took a million photos of the palm trees that are my artistic muse.
But I digress - this article is about learning a new technique. Before meeting Sophie I had not encountered cold wax medium. She gave me my own little Nutella jar filled with medium (the lid keeps the cold wax from drying out quickly).
We had palettes made from a large sheet of grease proof paper to one side, a brush cleaning bucket filled with solvent and a small jar of solvent to use for painting. I brought with me some Jackson’s artist quality oil paint tubes that were virtually unused in a variety of colours that I love including lemon yellow, Prussian blue and turquoise.
I masked off some Arches L’huile paper into six small sections to use for my experiments. There are lots of ways of applying the paint and working on small ‘paintings’ enabled me to explore the varying qualities of the cold wax and the different ways that the paint could be applied and manipulated.
Sophie is a natural teacher. She worked on her own paintings and as she worked she talked to me about what she was doing. The cold wax needs to be mixed with the oil paint in approximately a 50/50 amount of each. You mix the medium and the paint using a palette knife and need to be careful not to put the painted palette knife back into the cold wax. We applied the paint using rollers, palette knives, brushes and silicone paint spreaders. To thin the paint we used solvent.
Much as is the case with acrylic layering the subtlety starts to appear as the paint layers build. You just need to start with building by scraping and brushing the colour on without too much anxiety about where it might lead.
Unlike acrylic however there does come an earlier point with oil paint when you have to stop to avoid muddying the colours. So it was good to have several paintings to work on. I started with some bright yellows and reds as I often do in my acrylic paintings. Then added some darker colours for contrast. Sophie showed me how the magic starts to happen when you drip solvent directly on to the paint and then use the silicone tool to rub away the paint to reveal layers underneath. Also how to add veils of colour by rolling over everything with pale buff titanium white or other pale colours.
The process is primarily about exploring how the paint responds to being dripped on, peeled or rubbed back and scratched into with skewers or other scraper tools. I particularly loved the way that the painting responded to the solvent creating effects that would not be possible using mark making tools. The skill with this medium, like any really, is to understand it well enough to control the happy accidents and make them happen so that you can purposefully create the effects you want for your paintings.
I really enjoyed using the skewer to scratch some organic shapes into my paintings. This first attempt has taught me so much about the potential to utilise this medium in the future. For me I think the real excitement will come when the paintings have dried enough for me to start adding marks in acrylics on top of the oil.
Doing our sketchbook project has shown us that these media work well together and I’m excited to begin to explore cold wax backdrops as a rich starting point for my signature marks using acrylics. But who knows where this will lead? The exciting thing about learning from an expert like Sophie, who has now been exploring this medium for a year or so following a course with Yorkshire artist Paula Dunn, is the chance to leap across and beyond the solo exploration using a book or you tube demos.
I can honestly say that getting together with art buddies is definitely the most enjoyable way of learning new skills. Sophie and I both agreed that in art we are not competing with each other - I am certainly not going to suddenly start painting the Helford River with tangerine skies but sharing technique is an enriching experience where both guide and student benefit in so many intangible ways.
Every artist has their own visual vocabulary and that becomes a language that is personal. But to learn new ways of doing things and expanding your visual language enriches the potential to move work forwards in a new direction.
I have no idea where this will lead in my own art. I may just have a go for a while and then return to my beloved acrylics but I have absolutely fallen in love with the potential to add a new depth to my paintings using the cold wax and oil and it’s very much a watch this space.
Recommended Links
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To see more of my paintings go to artistintheshed.com
View my daily posts on Instagram here
See Sophie Velzian’s work here and read her Substack here
See more of Paula Dunn’s work here
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Great to hear about your wonderful time. I use cold wax and oil but have never put acrylic on. I worry it may peel off but you never know until you experiment. ! Annnnnnnd it’s a beautiful area of the country too! Glad you had fun xxx
So much inspiration, Mary! Thank you for sharing! Looks like so much fun 🎨♥️