Golden Chrysopoeia

Lustrous finish coats of varnish or liquid laminate can be the chrysopoeia you need to improve your fortune.

Chrysopoeia is something that art and alchemy have in common. Translated literally, chrysopoeia is the transmutation of an object into gold. Add a dash of magic and it can be a golden opportunity to turn pictures into profits.

Profits have been hard to come by during the last little while, especially for artists. Therefore anything that can be done to increase the likelihood of an artwork's sale is to the benefit of everyone. Adding value to the giclée prints we make has been our method at Vashon Island Imaging. Instead of discounting things (which makes them seem cheap in the minds of customers) we add value, making our work -- and our customers' -- worth more than what the competition delivers.

(Actually, we don't have any competitors because we are the only shop in town that offers a complete giclée art production service from file creation through prepress and printing all the way to coating, stretching and mounting. Normally an artist would have to go to two or three suppliers to get that range of services. But we do it all under one roof.)

One way we add value to our giclée printing is to coat them with a protective finish at no extra cost to the customer. Although some of our artist clients prefer no coating or protect their giclées under glass, most appreciate this added value.

A protective coating is needed for giclées because they are more fragile than images printed photographically or by traditional printing methods such as lithography. They are more fragile because the inks are sprayed on and adhere to a 'ground' medium on the paper or canvas being printed. The sprayed pigments are more easily abraded or marred because they sit right on top of the media. Coatings of varnish or laminate protect the pigments from UV and airborne pollutants as well as from marring.

Followers of this blog know that we previously used Golden® MSP Varnish almost exclusively for our canvas giclées but have lately switched to aqueous liquid laminates for the most part. The switch led to an investigation of all the different types of water-based coatings out there... which in turn led to the 'road test' series of blogs about aqueous coatings. At Vashon Island Imaging we now prefer aqueous coating systems over the traditional solvent types not only because they are 'greener' but because they 'cure' instead of drying. That means your pictures won't stick together (solvent varnishes never completely dry). This fourth road test is about Golden® Polymer Varnish with UVLS.


Golden® Polymer Varnish is water soluble and comes in gloss, satin and matte finishes. It is quite different from any of the other three aqueous liquid laminate coating systems tested so far.

All coatings have odors that give you a sense of what they are made from. Golden® Polymer Varnish smells strongly of ammonia. The manufacturer says that the varnish is removable at a later date using ammonia, which is why it is classified as a 'varnish' as opposed to a 'laminate'. The fact that it can be stripped off later may be significant in the eyes of purists and archivists but for the average artist it probably unimportant.


Straight out of the bottle Golden® Polymer Varnish is thicker than the liquid laminates we tested previously. The company recommends splitting it with water by up to 100% (a 1:1 mixture) for spray applications... so I started with a 3:1 split. That is, 3 parts varnish to one part of water. The solution passed the 'shake the bottle' test with flying colors... no particulates could be seen and the solution slid down the insides of the glass container smooth, clean and clear, just the way you like.


Four test strips were selected (shown above) to be sprayed with the gloss finish varnish. Two were printed on Outré® Gloss Canvas (the center two) and two were on Epson® Premium Canvas Matte (at the left and right). I chose test strips with both pastel and strong colors to see the effect of this new coating on the hues and saturation levels. What particularly interested me was the look that would come from gloss varnish on matte canvas. I like to use coatings creatively and have written extensively about that in my book, Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée.

Using the 3:1 mixture I applied the first coating. It went on well then a funny thing happened, it showed distinct bubbling (see pix below). Bubbles? I never encountered bubbles when spraying. I've encountered bubbling using rollers, but never spraying. It looked like there was a chemical reaction going on and I thought to myself 'Egad... the chrysopoeia has begun!'. Right.


Actually, those bubbles made me think that my fortunes had changed for the worse. If this were liquid lam the bubbles would be a disaster because the stuff cures so fast you'd nevel have a chance to level them out.

Quickly I grabbed a dry brush like the one pictured below, moistened it just slightly and gently smoothed out the bubbles... then more appeared... and still more. I smoothed them out thrice and stopped because it was useless and because the varnish was getting dry and wasn't leveling, so I was getting brush strokes (a possible 'new look' for future giclées).


Thinking that perhaps I hadn't the right split I added enough water to make it a 2:1 mixture. A second application was made and... more bubbles! This time I got right on them. The thinner solution leveled better and allowed more of the bubbles to pop of their own accord... and also took a lot longer to dry. As it was getting late, I decided to pick-it up the next morning.

Then I thinned the working solution to a 1:1 mixture and made a third application. This time the mixture was too thin and the varnish pooled (see pix below), requiring brushwork to smooth it out... but there were no bubbles.


When it was dry the Golden® Polymer Varnish added a real shine to Outré® Gloss Canvas and it gave a satin-like finish on Epson® matte canvas. Significantly, the varnish dried crystal clear with no loss of dmax in the dark tones. Dark colors on the matte canvas test strip were actually improved by the contrast kick that the gloss varnish provided.


Satisfied that things were under control, I reverted to a 2:1 mixture and sprayed a 48 X 36-inch piece printed on Epson® matte canvas entitled 'Glass Eye'. I chose this piece because it has enough strength to survive any loss of dmax that might be encountered (remembering what happened to the piece I coated with Moab® Desert Varnish).

The first thing I noticed was that no bubbles appeared. That seemed odd after so many during the spray session yesterday. The only thing I can attribute them to now is the temperature. Yesterday it was in the high 70's and this morning it is in the 60's. Yesterday I shot in sunshine, this morning in shade.

I lost count as to how many coats I sprayed... at least 10. The stuff was so thin that a couple of times I had to rescue the finish from runs with the dry brush. I have since adjusted my application speed to reduce the build-up of the thin solution. Fortunately, the varnish sets up a bit slower than liquid laminates so you have more time to do emergency repair work. Even though there were a lot of layers, the Golden® Polymer Varnish blends nicely with fewer 'wet edge' problems than faster curing liquid lams. In the end I used nearly the entire pint on the one 12-square-foot piece.

Next I sprayed satin finish varnish onto a 28 X 35-inch piece that was also printed on Epson® matte canvas. First I gave it a double base coat of the gloss, then three more coats of satin. The result was a nice 'leathery' look and feel with no significant loss of dmax. Although I was hoping for a little kick to the contrast there was little change at all. The clarity of Golden® Polymer Varnish is an important distinction when working with matte canvases which already have low dmax. Compared to gloss and satin canvas the matte versions have no real black, therefore any coating that reduces dmax further can be a problem as we saw with Moab® Desert Varnish (see earlier blog).

Golden® Polymer Varnish runs much cleaner than liquid laminates. There is no partial curing in the paint pot so that no 'strings' or bits of gunk spoil the spray. The gloss has no precipitates whatsoever and the spray gun nozzle stayed clean throughout. Here is where the ability to remove dried varnish with ammonia comes in handly because if the gun nozzle did clog, you could dissolve away the gunk using an ammonia solution (don't forget to wear gloves and work in a very well ventilated space when using ammonia).

Golden® Polymer Varnish with UVLS is slightly more costly. I reckon I got 16 square feet of coverage for the pint, which cost $20 or $1.25 per square foot. or nearly 14¢ per square inch. At that rate we cannot afford to give it away as our base rate for canvas printing is already a low 13¢ per square inch. Clear Shield by Clear Star® costs half that much to use on a square-foot basis, although it is a liquid laminate, not a varnish and is therefore permanent and un-removable. Premier® ECO Print Shield is also 20% less expensive to use. That said, I may have over-coated the big piece and in all fairness will try another pint of gloss to see how far it goes before calling this case closed because I like the results I am getting and the 'cleanliness'.

Perhaps even more persuasive is the manufacturer's reputation which is, well... 'golden'. The Golden® paint company has been around for a long time and their products are available in just about every major art supply store. On the other hand, Clear Shield and Premier® ECO Print Shield are hard to find items requiring shipping the product to us from far away, an added inconvenience. Moab® Desert Varnish is more readily available but we'll never use it again so that doesn't matter.

For now it's a close race between Clear Shield and Golden® Polymer Varnish. If Clear Shield becomes easier to obtain, we'll probably select that product to be our 'house' coating at Vashon Island Imaging. If not, Golden® Polymer Varnish will be a 'clear' choice for a coating that adds the 'Midas touch'.