Liquitex Professional Acrylic Varnish, High Gloss, 946 ml

Product Information

Apply in thin layers with a good quality varnishing brush, allowing a minimum of 3 hours drying time between coats. Apart from suggesting that you don’t use it as the final protective surface anyway (you can apply MSA or Soluvar over it, in fact it’s recommended to use them this way) you probably just need to build up a greater thickness of varnish. The product needed three thin layers to get the right depth of shine, but the shine is wonderful once complete. Two or three coats is usually sufficient, with each each successive layer applied at right angles to the one before.

This one is easy to apply (make sure you don't overbrush) it dries to an even shine, and lifts the dark colours. Our varnishes offer physical protection from knocks and dirt, plus an extra layer of UV-light protection. The only difficulty I experienced doing it the second way was occasional really tiny bubble forming.

It can be used as a non-removable varnish to protect your painting and establish a gloss sheen surface. The more you disturb it by brushing over the same area the more likely you are to form bubbles or lift partially-dried varnish. Epifanes Clear High Gloss Varnish, known around the world, is considered the ultimate in high gloss finish.

Today, Winsor and Newton remain the premier choice for artists, offering a wide variety of fine art supplies including: oil, water colour, acrylic and alkyd paints, pastels, artists' brushes, canvases, papers and portfolios. For water-based varnish rinse it out thoroughly (under a cold running tap is good) until there is no milky residue visible when you bend or squeeze it and then lightly soap and rinse thoroughly again. The formulas are all compatible - just make sure you don't mix them vigorously as you may capture air bubbles and cause a cloudy effect. This product complies with the limits for the migration of heavy metals to children's toys according to DIN EN 71-3 and thus fulfils one of several further requirements for the safety of children's toys according to the EU "Toy Directive" (2009/48/EC). If you apply a single coat and you’re getting sufficient coverage you’re probably applying it too thickly.

This product cannot be used for wet-on-wet coatings (as are common in solvent-based high-gloss varnishing systems). When you’re done, the painting needs to be protected during drying so you will have to improvise something to prevent dust landing on the surface, a board held a couple of inches over the surface on two stacks of books is probably easiest. If I could I’d not use varnish, but since acrylics dry dull and darker, it makes the painting more vivid again to use a protective varnish.

For spirit-based varnish the application process is simpler, you can apply it in much the same manner as above but you have more time to even out any irregularities by ‘laying off’ – light strokes with the brush tip at right angles to the direction of application – without fear of bubbles forming.

In the former case you have to be careful to prevent friction which leads to the formation of bubbles which can dry inside the varnish layer and are impossible to remove.