Golden® Polymer Varnish Redux

Road Test #4 entitled 'Golden Chrysopoeia' gave Golden® Polymer Varnish with UVLS a good rating except for the usage cost. However, I promised then to revisit the product and further test it's qualifications as a 'golden opportunity' for those who coat giclée prints. Road Test #4 therefore went into extra innings.

The extended Road Test involved 10 giclée prints being prepared for a show of Kirk Beeler's work at Café Luna on Vashon Island. Beeler's show will premier on Friday, August 6th as part of the Vashon Island Art Cruise. On the first Friday of every month the whole town stays open until 9:00pm (21:00) and all the galleries put up new shows.

Beeler's show entails 9 selections raging in size from 12 X 8 inches (30 X 20 cm) to 30 X 20 inches (75 X 50 cm) and a 10th piece described below. His subjects are often moody and dark with full rich tones.


Kirk sometimes shoots with a Noblex® camera. It's a camera you might see on Antiques Roadshow but it shoots a hell of a good panorama. The ratio is 1:3, a very popular format. The film negs and trannies are huge so there's plenty of resolution. This show has a print made from one of those Novoflex® images entitled 'Mount Ranier from Maury Island', pictured below.


At Vashon Island Imaging we print for many artists and photographers but Kirk Beeler is a special client having been one of the first Island photographers to present their work as giclée prints instead of paper-prints which are traditionally favored for photos. But times have been a changin'...

Prepressing Kirk Beeler's pictures is like printing for Ansel Adams... prints of both photographers' works require full rich dark tones that don't clog up and light tones that aren't burned out... the subject of an upcoming blog. But back to Golden...

Work that we had previously coated for Kirk had been coated with either Golden® MSP Varnish (a solvent coating) or Clear Shield. Of the two, Kirk preferred three coats of Clear Shield on Epson® Premier Canvas Matte, which produces a nice leathery finish. Now it was time to create that look with Golden® Polymer Varnish.

The first six giclée prints were given four coats of a 3:1 blend. Three coats almost created the desired leathery-finish look, but a fourth made all the difference (even if it did drive up the costs of an already expensive coating product by 33%).

Here are the stats: 1.5 pints (710 ml) of stock Golden® Polymer Varnish were split 3:1 with water to make 1 quart (.95 liter) of working solution. The quart covered 2800 square inches or 19.44 sq. ft. (18,064 sq. cm or 1.81 sq. meters) and cost $30.00 (no shipping costs). That works out to $1.54 per square foot (.09 sq meters) compared to 66¢ for my next favorite coating, Clear Shield (www.clearstarcorp.com). That makes Golden® Polymer Varnish With UVLS 2.3 times more expensive to use than Clear Shield.

Normally I run from products that cost so much more to use but this time I am prepared to live with it even though I may have to pass on some of the cost increase, which I hate to do right now. You see, I have few alternatives because Clear Shield is hard for us to get. The company has few dealers and doesn't respond to emails or calls in any meaningful way. That means we buy online and ship from far away. That is so way less convenient than picking up a product at the local art or camera store.

They are going about marketing the wrong way. It may be convenient and cheap for them but it isn't for the customer. I am a good example: I love the Clear Star® product but it's too hard to get and just as expensive as the Golden® Polymer Varnish product when you add in shipping etceteras.

If I were a Clear Shield distributor I would go around to every art and camera store in the neighborhood and preach the gospel according to Clear Star®. In the Seattle area you can easily get MOAB® coatings (which we don't use) at camera stores like Glazer's Camera and you can buy Golden® Polymer Varnish With UVLS at either Daniel Smith® Art Supplies or Utrecht® Art Supplies.


Golden® Polymer Varnish is not without sin. It is more subject to cracking than Clear Shield, as can be seen in the two pictures above and below.



You can really see the cracking problem in the corner folds.

Cracking problems are usually solved by rounding the leading edges of the stretcher bars. Jack Richeson & Company (800-233-2404) makes the ones we use. They are the best we've used so far except they tend to have sharp edges and sometimes the wood is so hard that the staples don't penetrate all the way. (That is a blessing in disguise actually because it makes staple removal easier if required at a later time. Anyone who's had to re-stretch a giclée print knows how hard it is to remove well-seated staples without damaging the giclée canvas.)


To prepare the stretcher bar edges for giclée prints coated with Golden® Polymer Varnish we lightly plane them using a rasp.


Round off the sharp edge (blue arrow) by coming in at several angles.



Finish the rounded edges with a light sanding with medium-coarse sandpaper.


One could argue that the extra step wouldn't be necessary if we were using Clear Shield (or Premier® ECO Print Shield) but I would replay that taking the sharp edge off a Richeson® stretcher bar is probably a good thing to do anyway. As I explain in my book, Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée (www.gicleeprepress.com), the rule of thumb is to use your thumb... press it into the edge and if it hurts the edge is too sharp.

At this point you'd expect that I'd say 'case closed' with the verdict going in Golden® 's favor. But the jury is out by default because the ball is still in Clear Star®'s court. Will they wake up? Or will they go the way of Betamax®, a superior video technology that was out-marketed by the folks who brought us VHS®.?

Stay tuned for the next adventure in the giclée coating 'Star' wars.