How To Carve Wax Sculptures
Use of wax sheets and cast forms.
How to carve wax sculptures. The technique is simple. A wax sculpture is a depiction made using a waxy substance. It must carve easily but it should also allow easy addition of material to fill in mistakes.
You can even rub your fingers across it fast creating friction and causing it to get soft. You can get a battery operated version relatively cheaply for approximately 25 but you can only use this for about 15 minutes at a time so it does have its limitations. This tool can easily be transformed into a wax carving tool simply by adding a specific wax carving burr.
Run hot water directly on the spot that you want to shape. Cooling bronze slows down and can leave holes or gaps in the casting. Embrace that into a pretty design by helping each strip curl like a ringlet near the bottom and then piling another on top by stripping another thin layer from the newly exposed wax underneath.
There are two ways to do this. Once the wax is built on it and chased finished the core can be dissolved with acetone and the remaining wax can be invested and cast. Warm up the wax so that it is malleable enough to shape.
A modern variant that is applicable to our class is to make a core using Styrofoam. If Chopra Jonas tattoos the Pittsburgh Steelers logo on her cheek there will be somebody standing by to carefully etch it into the wax record. When you start wax carving you will soon start creating pieces that involve joining waxes or make repairs to broken waxes and a wax pen is the easiest way to do this.
After trying a few different types of sculpting media water-based and polymer clays oil based plasticine basswood carvable foam I decided that carving wax was a material that I could live with. Prepare a solid block of wax for carving. I will often heat a metal tool over a flame to gently melt a part of it.