Henry Moore: wax resist with ink underground shelter drawing
I was at school when I first discovered drawing using wax resist techniques and perhaps because it is often introduced as a way of adding texture to a drawing as part of a school art room exercise, it is rarely used again. However like any process it has rich possibilities and in this case a long history.
My interest in wax resist techniques as a way of working was rekindled a few years ago when I put on an exhibition of work that was being produced in my local area of Chapeltown in Leeds. One of the artists I made contact with was Oluseyi Ogunjobi, a storyteller, musician, painter, textile artist and translator. Seyi’s images try to capture the universal essence of spirituality and tap into traditional life and stories found in Yoruba culture. He paints as well as makes images using resist techniques and the images he supplied for the exhibition both used wax resist.
Oluseyi Ogunjobi
Resist techniques are common in Yoruba imagery, originally using starch and more recently wax, the Yoruba tradition is one that Oluseyi continues, converting stories originally designed to be passed on via oral traditions, into visual patterns. Like the sand drawings I looked at from the New Hebrides a while ago, these images would have been made as part of a holistic tradition, and when Seyi (Oluseyi) showed his images he also came and told stories about them. The more I become aware of these traditions, the more I believe as artists we need to think about a more holistic approach to art.
Yoruba textile using starch resist
Wax resist as a technique is thousands of years old and its unique visual quality means that it is constantly being rediscovered as a way of making images that tap into mythic pasts. For instance Susanne Wenger has revisited Yoruba culture and brought it back into contact with a German tradition of expressionist woodcuts, the results being powerful images that cross over several cultural boundaries.
Susanne Wenger: Wax resist
Wax resist or 'Batik' traditions of image making have been found in the Far East, Middle East, Central Asia and India from over 2000 years ago. The craft spread from Asia to the islands of the Malay Archipelago and west to the Middle East via caravan routes. Batik, from the Javanese word 'tin' to dot, is usually produced by painting in hot wax onto cloth and then when the cloth is dyed the resist areas remain uncoloured. Finally the wax is removed once the various layers of wax painting and dying have been completed. As you can see from the image of a detail from an Indonesian sarong below, the process can lead to very complex images and because many motifs need to be repeated, batik is often associated with wood block printing techniques, the blocks can be used to print both wax for resist purposes and to ink areas of cloth.
Contemporary batik Indonesian sarong design
It's an old film but it shows how you can use charcoal dust and a small star-wheel to draw through paper onto a cloth beneath, by pricking holes using a rolling star-wheel following along previously drawn lines. It demonstrates how the techniques of making cartoons and transferring them for fresco, were very closely modelled on techniques that would have been used to transfer designs onto cloth. I've also got a very personal reason for making a link to the film, Anna was a fellow student on the DipAd Fine Art course I studied at Newport College of Art and she has sadly now passed away.
Henry Moore used wax crayons for his resist technique and users of watercolour and ink make use of a variety of resist techniques, in the image below you can see John Singer Sargent using wax scribbles as a resist technique.
John Singer Sargent
An artist such as Bernadette Madden who is also a printmaker uses batik techniques to work in a territory that sort of sits halfway between painting, printmaking and drawing and she is well worth investigating if you are wanting to explore colour and surface resist techniques.
Bernadette Madden
Resist techniques are many and various, try painting an image loosely in gouache and then when dry going over it in black ink. When the ink is dry wash out the gouache. The gouache colours will stain the paper and the black ink will seep in around the edges of each shape in unpredictable ways. It is often the unpredictability of using resists that makes for those unexpected moments of wonder. 
Picasso: Etching
The one area of print making that allows you to really develop your thinking via resist techniques is etching. Every time you have to put the plate in the acid you stop out or resist one or other areas of the plate. White is the only non bitten area left when etching away various parts of the plate, i. e. it is the area that has always had some sort of resist on it, through the whole time that plate has been worked on. (Except of course any area that has been burnished and re-polished). In my day you could use almost straight nitric acid on a zinc plate, but health and safety precautions now mean you would probably have to use ferric chloride, but even so, very similar results can be obtained. Working in this way can help you be more dramatic in your decision making and bolder in your design work. A combination of aquatint and open bite can be used alongside sugar lift and line work scratched through a hard ground to give you a very rich textural range.
George Rouault: Etching
Goya: Etching
This tradition is carried on by artists such as Paula Rego, the resist techniques of etching ensuring that the images that arrive are never over controlled, but emerge out of a sort of half guess as to what might happen if. The first pull of an etching plate is rather like that first moment that you brush ink over your wax resist, the image is always slightly unexpected, and in that unexpectedness lies its freshness and directness.
Paula Rego: Etching
See also:
More on drawing and printmakingMonoprints and lithographs
Monoprinting
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