Sculpting Comic Book and Game Characters: Using Toy Wax

Using wax

Finished resin casting

The hard carving or “Toy Wax”, as most professionals call it, is a wonderful and almost essential material to have in your artistic arsenal. This is even truer with today’s collectables having an extreme amount of detail and intricacy. Toy Wax is a fantastic and versatile material that has a bit of a learning curve but well worth the effort  if you want to achieve the results featured in this article.

Finished detailed wax

Of course many professionals are able to create the same level of detail in clay but there are already many books on the subject. The intention of this series of articles is to show you another approach to sculpture and one that has been used extensively and sometimes requested by companies for their own tooling processes.

Hasbro/Kenner and Mattel were the pioneers in using Toy Wax (or Hasbro and Mattel wax) and still use it today for their figures!

The first thing you need to understand about Toy wax (I will refer to it simply as WAX from here on) is that it is primarily a carving medium as opposed to a more malleable material such as clay or softer waxes. For example WAX cannot be pushed or moved around and has to carved away much like you would with soapstone or similar carving material.

The fantastic part is that you can add wax onto itself creating a permanent bond so you can also build up areas where needed. Wax feels very similar to a plastic substance when you first use it. The hard carving properties and the ability to add more wax allows a great level of detail that enables the user to hold the piece in their hand while working with no worries about distorting the sculpture or squishing details. In terms of finishing you can even sand and polish the surface getting a very clean finish.

Wax head almost complete

Because WAX cannot be manipulated like clay it is necessary to cast it into a mold that has the basic shape and gesture of the sculpture you want to end up with. This is to give us a base for which to go in and detail. Casting wax into a mold also saves time because if you were to try and build up the figure from scratch it would take you a very long time and is rather impractical.

For small parts this is possible (like a small portrait or a hand etc) but when you are dealing with a bust or a full figure it is always best to have the basic sculpture in clay to then mold and cast the wax to have a good base to start from. Using a clay to rough in the basic sculpture enables you to capture gesture in a way that would be very difficulty or almost impossible to do with a stiff material such as wax.

Clay Rough

In previous articles  we looked at how to create an armature and basic figure in clay that would serve as the ideal rough sculpture to mold for subsequent casting in wax.

As you can see in this photo the sculpture is roughed in to a point where all the basic shapes and forms are present. If you were to squint your eyes it would almost look finished.

How far you decide to take your rough is really up to you. Keep in mind that wax has a tendency to shrink about 3- 5% and mostly horizontally (pulling inward from the sides) so it can make shapes become thinner while not affecting the height as much visually distorting the work.

Wax  rough 1st stage

Wax rough in progress

More detailed wax progress

This is why you should not bring your clay to a complete finished state but keep it rough to allow you to make adjustments later during the wax stage. This is especially true when sculpting a likeness of a person as it would distort during the wax casting process and not allow much room for adjustment. In fact most of the time you can leave a portrait almost featureless and do the work in wax as long as the basic head shape is present.

Of course on a smaller scale portrait such as 1/8th or 1/6th scale the shrinkage will be more apparent then on a larger scale portrait such as 1/4th or 1/3rd.

Next: Preparing to mold the figure....