WAX CARVING EXPERIENCE

Carving wax has been a great experience for me; a first requirement for a wax cover is having a very good foundation in drawing, working in proportion as MEAGAN said

Carving saves time all depend with the design that will be made, a peace with more detail takes more time to make. The size of the piece also matters, large pieces takes more time then small pieces, but small pieces with details is much more complicated and it requires more time

Normally wax always come in blocks a tubes that can be cut to size with a special saw blades and carved in to intricate three dimension of forms, wax tube is cut into slices and can be easily carved to make a ring. The saw blades that used are called Spiral saw blades,

I normally work with green and blue wax, the difference colors of those only determines the propriety and the hardness of the wax.

I have found that the blue carving wax works better for me, it is soft, slightly flexible which allows the wax to be carved very thin without as much risk of breaking, more easy to engrave, and add some details on.

Green wax it is very hard and high degree of detail can be carved, but it is quite brittle and so should be used for solid forms and simple design, this wax takes long to harden when fire applied, with the green wax I mostly use large burgs to shape the wax design.

Red wax called Modeling wax it is much softer than the green and the blue wax, the design can be shaped by hands nice to work with while making bigger pieces, it’s too soft to be carved it can be warmed with the fingers before smoothing it over.

HOW TO MAKE A DESIGN WITH WAX

Always draw the design on the wax with the sharp tool or print the design on the paper and stick it on the wax then cut out the design with the Spiral saw blade or using different sizes of burs. When the design is formed from that point I can be adding some details by carving using some specific tools, and adding some wax on as Lines, Dotes by using a hot middle.

By adding some wax on the design I have noticed that wax that has been melted does not have the same hardness as the original wax previously melted wax seemed to be

When the design finish as Meghan always say it’s always better to clean the peace in wax than in metal, by using smooth sun paper. Basically my second year was a year of laying a strong foundation and learning different ways of manufacturing jewellery.

this blades can be also used for plastics and other soft materials (the work bench guide to jewelry techniques book).