Sculpting Comic Book and Game Characters: Casting Toy Wax

Casting wax

Use a ladle to pour the mixture into your mold, again, pour the mixture down the side to help avoid air from being trapped. As your mold fills gently start to tilt it upright in a gradual fashion following the rising of the material.

Safety Tip: It is a very good idea to wear a face shield, apron and heat resistant work gloves when pouring wax as it will burn you quite severely if it comes in contact with your sin. Take proper precautions when pouring molten wax and make sure you area is free of obstructions!

Once poured it is a good idea to wait at least an hour before de-molding as the centre of the casting remains hot for quite some time! If all goes well you have a fairly accurate casting of your piece. Once completely cool simply undo your mold (be careful: wax is fragile so be gentle!) you should have a casting that resembles your clay!

Your castings will probably present some flaws when casting in alginate so you should expect them. Weld lines, caused by the rapid cooling of the wax upon contact with the alginate, are very common so don’t reject a casting if they show up because it is easily fixed later. The main concern is to have a good solid basic shape to work with.

If you get a casting that isn’t quite up to par then, if you didn’t tear it, simply put your mold back together and pour another wax. Usually you can get two or three castings out of an alginate mold if you are careful.

Working with wax

Wax is a carving medium that has the benefit of allowing you to add material onto itself where needed. It is very different from clay in this respect because it is rather hard (similar to a soap stone) and therefore cannot be pushed or pulled. The benefits of such a hard material is that you can replicate a range of surfaces rather easily from soft skin to hard metal objects since wax can be sanded and polished to a bright fine sheen!

Of course, as with anything, there is a slight learning curve with the material but once you understand how to work with wax your creativity holds no bounds!

One major benefit of wax is that you can hold parts of your sculpture in your hands while you work without having to worry about wrecking or distorting the piece. Also not having an armature means more freedom when cutting your sculpture.

I actually use very few tools when I work in wax. This is my own personal preference of course but I will refer to them when explaining my approach and technique. You will eventually find your own way of working and use tools suited to your taste.

After having cast my wax parts and de-molded them the first thing I usually do is to test fit them together and just see if there was any distortion during casting. As mentioned there will be a slight shrinkage (roughly 3% - 5% and mostly from the sides, thinning the work), which is to be expected, but what I’m looking at now is if anything is bent out of shape as it cooled. If so I simply run some warm/hot water into a suitably sized container and fully submerged the part letting it sit for a few minutes or until it becomes pliable. This type of wax is perfectly safe to immerse in water, as it has no ill affect to the wax itself.

Immersing a wax part in water allows the piece to warm up in a safe and uniform manner enabling me to manipulate the piece and make any slight adjustments according to my requirements. If you were to use another more direct heat source, such as a heat gun or butane torch, this could cause the wax to melt in an uncontrolled fashion instead of softening the work. Once satisfied with my adjustments I then quickly run cold water over the part to “set it” and prevent further bending.

The process is as follows:

1. Fill a suitably sized container (one that allows your wax piece to be fully immersed in water) with hot tap water (don’t use boiling water from a stove top or similar because it will be to hot for our purposes and could cause severe burns to you skin!). The water should be warm enough to heat the wax but not hot enough that it is uncomfortable on your skin.
2. Immerse wax piece(s) you intend to adjust in the water for a minute or two or until it feels rubbery and pliable. NOTE: thicker pieces will require more time to warm up.
3. Carefully retrieve the piece you intend to adjust while keeping the other parts immersed until needed (parts left sitting out will cool off rather quickly).
4. Bend piece to make desired adjustment.
5. Run under cool water for a few seconds or until wax is cool enough that it feels hard not rubbery.
6. Repeat process until you achieve desired changes.

This technique can be used for larger full body pose adjustments if you are patient and careful enough. For example if you want to bend an arm at the elbow without affecting the rest of the arm you can open the hot water tap very slightly so that only a fine stream of water will come out (only enough water to go over the section you want to soften) and place the area you want to affect underneath the stream for several minutes. The stream of water is rather thin so it can take several minutes before it warms up enough to bend.

To know if the piece is soft enough to bend simply apply gentle pressure with your finger on one end of the piece to see if it “gives” (do this while still keeping the part under the running water. If the part feels stiff then continue with the water but if it feels rubbery then you should be able to bend it. Be slow and gentle or it could break! Once bent to satisfaction run cold water of the whole piece to set it. This process can be repeated until necessary and can take several attempts before you achieve the desired affect.

Assembling the wax parts

Having test fit the parts I then proceed to weld them together using my wax pen set on a fairly high setting: hot enough that the wax melts into a liquid state but not so hot as to make it smoke on contact. I place the pieces in the desired position and using clay or “Sticky Tac” I keep the piece in position so that they won’t move. I then use a spatula tip on the pen and melt the area that touches both parts. I let cool it for a minute or two and then proceed to fill in any gaps that I may have missed in the first attempt. I then proceed to the other pieces repeating the process until my figure is whole again.

I like to join all my parts together and work the figure as one piece at first to make sure that I’m working on the sculpture as a whole and not taking one piece farther then the next which can cause disproportions. Once I’m at a point where I’m just doing fine detail work I can always cut it apart again with a small hack saw to work on the parts as individual pieces.

Preparing the Surface for detailing

You will notice that your cast surface has many imperfections and perhaps even lots of weld lines (especially if you used alginate to cast your parts): this is normal! The easiest solution I found to remove surface imperfections and smooth out rough areas quickly is to use a medium-fine sanding pad found at your local hardware store lightly heated over a flame (like a candle).

I found that using a rougher; medium to coarse, sanding pad first gets rid of major surface problems. Then I will repeat the process using finer sanding pads, while using less heat, to achieve a finer the surface. You will want to cut the sanding pad into smaller more manageable parts that can get into the hard to reach areas of your sculpture. I tend to cut my piece into smaller rectangles and triangles to give me some different shapes to work with according to what needs to be smoothed on the work. I gently sway the piece over the flame (never touching the flame!) so that it heats evenly without burning the actual pad or you fingers.

For quick smoothing of a very bumpy area I will heat the pad for several seconds until it is quite hot so that when I place it on my wax piece it will liquefy the surface a bit. By then applying light pressure with my fingers I then proceed to run the pad over the area I want to smooth in a swift motion following the curves of my sculpture. This is a real “coarse” smoothing technique; the process is then repeated over any problem areas until you have an even surface to create your detail work.

Detailing: Using the wax pen and carving tools

After having smoothed the surface of your pieces you will now want to add and carve wax into more refined forms and details.

You can manipulate wax in two basic ways:

1. Building-up (adding) Wax by dipping a wax pen into a wax “puck” and applying molten wax onto the desired area until proper build-up is achieved. Then, once cooled, tooling and carving the wax to refine the shapes and detail.
2. Carving (removing) shapes and/or scribing lines or details into the wax: this is especially useful for skin textures or similar fine details such as costume seams, stitching, fingernails, armour filigree, etc. anything that has a “drawing” aspect to it can be achieved in this manner as well as contouring of basic shapes.

The procedure for building up wax to carve down and refine can be broken down in this manner:

1. Dip wax pen into wax “puck” picking up a bit of wax.
2. Draw your detail in a rough and loose fashion much like you would with an old fashion ink “dip pen”.
3. Let wax cool on surface for a second or two (you will see it goes from shiny to matt as it cools).
4. Carve cooled wax into desired detail.
5. Repeat until you are satisfied with the result.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tools for working wax

The Wax Pen

Foredom Wax Carver

The main tool that is required in order to use toy wax is the wax pen. Unfortunately it will be your most expensive investment but one that if properly taken care of will last you a very long time! There are several wax pens on the market (look in a dental supply catalogue) with different features and going anywhere from $200 - $500 and up. The pen you choose will ultimately be your choice according to you needs and budget. If you can’t currently afford a wax pen you can makeshift one by attaching a wood-burning tool (available at most craft stores: get the one with interchangeable tips for fine wood-burning) to a plug-in dimmer switch found a most hardware stores. Of course this makeshift wax pen will never be as precise as a professional pen but at least you can get to try the techniques while you wait to purchase one.

I use a very (relatively) inexpensive wax pen made by FOREDOM (http://www.foredom.com/), which they call a “Wax Carver” (The K.WC-1 Wax Carver) includes the hand piece, control box, and 3 brass tips, and usually retails just under $200 US. It has several interchangeable tips, which are also quite cheap to replace, and several come with the actual pen. Additional tips can be purchased as well such as a large “spoon” (A-WT-7 Wax Carver Tip), which I recommend for faster build up. I also like using “A-WT-5 Wax Carver Tip” which is curved and offers a fine point that is great for detail work. There is also a 230-volt European CE rated model available (K.WC-2 Wax Carver Kit with 3 Tips, 230V).

Metal Carving and Loop Tools

With your wax pen you will also want to invest in some metal wax tools. These can be found at most jewellery and sculpture supply stores and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I personally tend to use a wax “knife” tool for my carving and scribing work and will show techniques mostly based on this one tools.

If you have trouble finding metal tools where you are located Games Workshop (the table top war games company: http://www.games-workshop.com/) makes an excellent carver they call a “sculpting tool” which is very close, if not identical, to the tool I use and retails for roughly $7.00.

Small loop tools are great for softening hard edges or even for some surface smoothing. Essentially they are a loop made from spring steel wire set into a handle of some sort (usually thin aluminium). I tend to purchase mine but you can make your own custom loop tools using piano wire (get a thinner gauge for smaller work) and setting it into a piece of brass tube using two-part epoxy glue.