Homemade Impasto Oil Paint Medium

Homemade Impasto Oil Paint Medium If you paint with knives, a medium is almost a must. I got tired of buying it, so I hunted around and found this initial recipe on http://bamberos.wordpress.com/. A cool artists's site, you should check it out. An impasto wax medium for oil paint can be made by slowly melting 2 parts white beeswax into 1 parts linseed oil. A block of wax at Micheal’s will cost you about 20.00 bucks, and try not to get the fake wax that’s cheaper, no paraffin, no micro-crystalline – simply because usually synthetics don’t mix well with natural oils. I do this on a cheap hot plate outside or in the garage but it can be done indoors if you don't have any other place to do it. *premeasure your wax and oil at least approximately before you start I have a small old double boiler for doing this obtained at a yard sale, but if you don't then you can do it as outlined below. 1. Use a small pot, fill 3/4 with water-just fill it enough that you won't be boiling all the water away within 20-30 minutes. 2. Place a tin coffee can inside, or any small metal container, it wont spill if your pot is small. 3. Pour your linseed oil before the water begins to boil. Open up the windows for ventilation as the linseed oil smell will get really strong. When the oil starts to get hot enough to melt the wax, ***don’t try to get the oil to boil***, ad some wax. 4. Slowly place small pieces about what you think is double the amount of linseed oil, into the oil until all the wax is melted or about 20 minutes. The wax will seem to disappear into the oil. Stir thoroughly until the wax melts away, you will not see the linseed oil change color or get thicker. 5. Turn off stove. Carefully remove the pot from the stove with cooking gloves or a pair of pliers and place it outside, or in the fridge after it cools a bit. This way the mix can cool faster. It takes about 20 mins to cool the mix down. The final consistency should be similar to lard in thickness and look. If the mixture is too hard or too oily, reheat and add more wax or oil. This will keep longer in a tube. If I don't have any large blank tubes on hand to load, I store the oil mix in the same tin can with the plastic lid and scoop out globs as needed. I've found that by using a softer mix with more oil you get a bit more gloss out of using this than by making it hard with more wax. You can vary the matte to gloss result by adding slightly more oil for gloss, or wax for matte. Be subtle with you variances too much wax won't work well, and too much oil doesn't work well either. I hope this is helpful to anyone who is having a hard time finding a good affordable impasto medium for oil painting. I've also used yellow beeswax for this and found the result to impart a very nice rich result that is almost unifying while using it in a painting. The small bit of yellow gives a little extra warmth and richness to the colors of your painting. Try the different bees-waxes and find out what works for you. I get my wax from ebay and it's quite cheap so no harm at all to play with. I mix this on my palette about 1/3 medium to 2/3 mixed oil color but you can add more to give translucency to certain colors for cool effects. Again you have to play with it. I keep a gob of the medium on my palette and then after mixing a color add the medium to the mixed color and proceed to lay it on. Have fun with this! D