How to Use Varnishing in Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail, and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you today how to do advanced painting techniques. Have you ever hit the nice art museum in town, and whenever you go in there you see the paintings, and all the sudden you go at an angle where the light shines on the painting and whoa! It's like they got little reflector lenses on that canvas. What that is, is varnish, very, very glossy varnish. This is a technique that artist use to protect their paintings in a number of ways. First off protect it from damage. Varnish will form a little layer which will prevent people from going up and clawing it. As soon as there are crazies out there, as soon as paintings have bad luck on their owners. Also, varnish can help prevent aging in terms of, like, exposure to sunlight, oxygen, etc. It kind of seals the paint in there in a more effective fashion as opposed to just leaving the canvas there with the paint exposed to oxygen over years. Now I'm taking a fan brush, because I like, like the nice light touch a fan brush has. When I basically put on here, I put on some media, very, very popular painting media includes turpentine. That's one of the most popular but, it's a little toxic, a little hard on the old nose and eyes, so there are a lot of environmentally sensitive alternatives now days that you can also get out there. Now look what this varnish is already doing. See how the reflection is so much more extreme? This varnish will dry like this if it, sometimes it gets a little more of a matte finish, do another layer of varnish. Eventually, you'll build up a nice gloss on your painting which will protect it and also give it a little more of that (snap) pizazz look in the light when it's hanging up in a museum, or perhaps just at your own home."