An Overview of How the Wax Outline of Batik Designs Are Made

Batik is a fabric made by a method of hand-printing textiles, by coating with wax a resist to the parts not to be dyed. Although there are many types of "resist" that can be used, wax is the most common. Beeswax, paraffin wax, and resins can be purchased already mixed or custom mixed by the artist.

There are numerous methods of applying the resist to the fabric. The three most common are: 1) using a chanting / tjanting tool (a copper tipped hollow pen that spills wax smoothly onto the cloth material), for free hand drawing a wax outline, 2) applying the wax to the fabric by hand using a metal tjap, 3) using a sponge or brush to apply the resist. For production fabrics (a very loose term when applied to hand made fabrics), tjaps are the method of choice, simply because they are faster to use.

Once a design has been approved for production, a metal artist needs to make a tjap. A tjap is a series of copper plates arranged on a wooden handle in the desired design. Tjaps are used to carry the hot wax to the fabric. The hot wax surrounds the fibers in the fabric and resists the movement of dye into them. In other words, when the waxed fabric is submerged in to a dye bath, the fabric under the wax resists the dye, and stays the same color as it was before dyeing. Areas of fabric that are waxed first remain white (or what ever color the fabric is before starting the process); areas waxed after dyeing remain the color of the dye. This process lends itself to images that are exotic in nature and have clear contour.

If the tjap imprints are done carefully it is virtually impossible to see that each yard of fabric has 9 to 12 different sets of the imprint. More complex designs can easily have twice that number of imprints put on at two or three different times with dyeing, hand painting, and drying in between.

The most common kinds of batik fabric used are those made from natural fibre. Ideally, experiments should be conducted on unbleached muslin. However, the more common kinds of fabric used are cotton and silk. Crêpe de Chine, georgette, and chiffon are also effective, but taffeta and non-washable silks usually make poor materials to work with, due to their artificial stiffening.

Vocabulary:

Batik : A wax-resist method of creating designs on fabric

Tjap : Copper stamps that transfer wax to fabric in a uniform manner

Chanting / Tjanting : A wax tool or pen with a well and fine tip for creating thin lines with melted wax

Wax- resist : The use of melted wax to impregnate fibers so the fibers will not absorb dye

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