Hello All, Felt I had to jump in here to sing the praises of my
favorite wax company over the past 15 years. They have accepted
calls and questions with perfect attention and response. You will
find a wonderful, newly designed website to browse now and I believe
they still have an excellent small catalog of products you can
request to refer to for any technical info you need on the various and
varied waxs. http://www.kindtcollins.com They make the Ferris line
and File-a-wax among many others. Enjoy and prosper.
Karen, beeswax can be used in lost wax casting, but you may find it
too soft to hold up in make a three dimensional design and the
surface not hard enough to make sharp cuts or carvings. If you’re
interested in working with soft material, wherein you could work on
it without heat, try the sculpture wax…it’s good for small
sculpture and water forming, but not for making rings, etc. Beeswax
mixed with pine pitch and a little paraffin, is usually melted in a
double boiler and kneaded over and over to get it to a plastic
consistency and pulled like taffy to to make a stringy-tape like
designs. Formulas on the mixture are a well kept secret by the
artists. But, here in Japan there are two (one soft and the other
medium ) ready-made products on the commercial market. Since you
already know about the build-up technique and the hard carving wax,
we won’t go into those.
The Japanese technique using a bees wax, rosin and another wax
mixture with a taffy like striated texture is called Mitsuro and is
described along with other Japanese techniques in the book " Practical
wax modeling - advanced techniques " by Hitsuro Tsuyuki and Yoko
Ohba. ISBN 4-87790-004-7. Mitsuro is a modeling technique rather
than a carving one. Carving techniques with hard wax are also in this
book.