The Medium?
Acrylic on Canvas.
The Problem?
I made a beautiful painting I love. I decided to add a protective varnish before (never have varnished my paintings before). I bought Liquitex varnish in glossy, satin, and matte. My goal was to have a matte finish to the painting.
As the bottle suggested, I added a coat of glossy varnish first (for this to look good, I had to use generous amounts or you would see streaks on the painting). After two coats of glossy varnish, it dried clear, even and glossy. It actually looked great. But I wanted a matte finish.
Using the same method, I was generous applying the matte varnish. There were horizontal lines of excess varnish where my brush lines met, but in the gloss varnish these had evened out and dried clear. In the matte varnish however, it dried thicker and so now you can see these horizontal 'lines' on the painting from the varnish.
Advice
- I would like to know if there is a way I can fix this or if my favourite painting is now ruined from this coating of matte varnish.
Marion Boddy-Evans, Painting Guide, says:
Varnish can be unforgiving, and matte varnish particularly so. Varnishing successfully takes a bit of practice -- just like learning to paint does -- and it's best done in multiple thin coats. It's a harsh lesson to learn on a painting you love though!
Whether you can remove the varnish or not depends which type you used. Liquitex produce two types of varnish which they call "archival permanent and archival removablee". The latter can be lifted using mineral spirits. If you do it gently you should be able to get it off without lifting the paint underneath. Don't scrub at the painting, and ideally do a test removal on another painting before trying it on the important one.
If it was permanent varnish, then it's not formulated to come off. If you do decide to try anyway, with solvent, test it on scrap painting first not the important painting. It could easily make matters even worse.
Golden Artist's Color archival information varnish removal says you can check the effectiveness of solvent with some of the wet varnish by seeing if it gets cloudy/thicker or not.
