 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about five uses for varnish beyond sealing your miniature. That is to say, I think the most common way people think to use varnish is at the end of their paint job, they get out their favorite type of varnish, whatever it happens to be, and they put a nice coat of it on there and seal up the miniature. That's fine, nothing wrong with that, that's the classic use for varnish and of course it's a good one. But there's a lot more we can do, so I'm going to tell you about five different things you can do with varnish throughout the painting process to bring them to use. Here I've got a selection of different varnishes. This is some AK Interactive Ultra Matte varnish. I have a product review of this that you can check out. Here I've got some basic matte, gloss, and satin. And all of them have some different uses. So the first thing we can do is gap filling. Just so often when you're putting together a miniature, you'll have a seam line, something that runs down the back there, and laying down a little bit of varnish and then reapplying a paint over it. If you find it in the painting process, one of the things you can do is just apply some matte or satin or gloss, any kind of varnish, and then apply some paint back over the top, and sure enough, it'll go away. As a good example of that, here's the frame of a night titan I was working on and if you know the legs of these things, you know they come in two separate pieces, and often are very difficult to get that gap completely gone. So what I did here with this leg is coated it in varnish, and then repainted over it, and bottom boom, smooth as can be. No sign of that there, so just I primed it, noticed it was still a little there, laid down a solid coat of gloss varnish, let it dry completely, put the metal over top, the gap was gone. I have a whole video on doing this with matte varnish, you can do it with any kind, I'll link that down in the description. The second thing I do is to seal a miniature after priming, after glazing, etc. So looking back at this kitty cat, which I just started out on, he's got some basic value sketches and just crazy things going on, he'll get there eventually. This guy, after I primed him, I went ahead and just gave him a coat of varnish. When I paint miniatures, I'll often end up varnishing things, six times, eight times, ten times throughout the course of my painting. Any time I apply thin glazes, thin inks, anything where it's going to risk reactivation, I'll take it over and give it a nice thin coat of varnish. Going through your airbrush, you can apply a coat of varnish quickly, effectively, and with no risk of it fuzzing over. And what that does is it seals in those layers, so in this case I wanted to seal in the primer layer. But as I get through the painting process and start doing really thin glazes, where they're very fragile because the paint is very thin, by the way this is also true for things like contrast paint, where when you later go and want to paint over contrast or dry brush over it, you can damage the paint, because it is so thin in the way it applies on the miniature. The answer is varnish in the middle. Makes your paint solid, durable, resistant to all your future work, you don't risk any reactivation, you can dry brush over the top, paint still sticks to varnish just fine, so you can just keep painting away happily without any risk of damaging your work. Plus, when you varnish in the middle, it also gives you a sort of save point. After you lay down a nice coat of varnish, if I'm then painting later, and I get a little paint where it shouldn't be, I can just grab a nice big brush, you know, a nice synthetic hard brush, and I'll just literally scrape at the paint like that, and nothing will rub off, okay? So that's a nice easy trick to keep your miniature safe and to make it so if you make a mistake later in the painting process, you can just wipe it right away, because you just flood the earth with water, wipe and boom, the paint is gone. The third use of varnish in the painting process is to smooth white. So I very frequently will incorporate pure white into things like non-metallic weapons. So here you can see she obviously goes all the way to pure white on her sword. And if you've ever painted with white, you know that it can get chalky very easy. I want to avoid that when I'm working with my white. So one of the tricks to that is obviously to integrate white ink. White ink tends to be smoother, but any white is going to eventually get a little chalky when it's thin, even white ink. Mixing in gloss varnish can actually help that when you're applying the pure white. So in this case, you want to specifically have your gloss varnish. And the reason for that is because white is reflecting pure white, it's just light, it's white light. When you mix in gloss varnish, the gloss varnish is also reflecting bright white. So in that case, it'll actually eliminate that chalky sensation and make it look like one smooth plane of white. So it just makes it a lot easier. If you find yourself using pure white on things like non-metallic weapons or other places like that, the integration of a little bit of gloss varnish into your mix, I usually do it at about a two to one ratio to paint to one varnish. And you'll find all of a sudden you get a really nice smooth application of your white. Okay, number four, reduce the shine or thin your paint. So here's the side of this demon fire rift. This part right here was painted with just a standard red paint, thinned and out of the pot. You'll notice it's quite shiny. If you've ever used red paints out of the out of the drop or out of the pot, whatever you want to say, you'll notice that that color is often very prone to a high level of gloss. Some paint lines are just more satin than others and have this shine to them. If you don't want your paint to be shiny, because in a case like this, it's really distracting to have a bright, shiny, reflective red in your fire, you wouldn't want that. This part right here is the exact same paint, but mixed one to one with ultra matte varnish. So you can take your matte or your ultra matte varnish, mix a little bit in with your red. You don't actually have to go one to one there. I did it because I'm going to talk about a second part here in a moment. But I did it to show, look how that part became completely matte, right? You'll notice it also looks not as red, but that's because it was thinned, right? Which leads me to my second. Talk about this. Not only when you're integrating it, can you reduce the shine. You can also use that ultra matte just to thin your paint. It makes your paint, when it gets thinner, quite durable and tough. So just as I talked about before in the second option, or your second sort of method, where you're using the varnish to enhance and protect and give you a safe point for those layers, you could just directly mix it with the paint as I did here. And not only do you then kill all the shine and work with a perfectly matte surface, which is often important, especially in competition pieces. But you can also create your glazes, your thin layers, whatever you want, a lower consistency just off of thinning it with the varnish. And then not only do you get your normal thin paint, but also you get something that's really durable, right? So that's your fourth option. Okay, final one, final one, number five, and a very funny one. If you've ever had occasion to paint something clear, so this most often comes up in things like stained glass or the canopies of aircraft and things like that, maybe you want to tint them a slight color. You want it like here in stained glass, I wanted this to have the all sorts of different colors, right? But perhaps with your canopy, you just want a slight blue glaze to it. But of course, applying a thin ink or a thin glaze of a paint to just straight over a plastic clear canopy, it isn't going to stick. It's going to bead up. The answer there is you can prime with varnish. Any of the varnishes will work. This is also quite useful for those bones or I think the Nolzer's miniatures make some like the Big Gelatinous Cube where the miniatures are clear and you may want to paint them a color. Well, you can't prime them with your traditional opaque primers because obviously then you'll lose the clear transparent effect. However, if you prime with just a varnish, you'll notice that then you can lay the ink right over the top without any issue. It'll stick just fine as you can see here. You can do this with a canopy and you'll get a nice solid easy, the blue glazes of your ink or whatever will apply just fine and then you can actually keep all the transparency in your paint without any need to prime. There you go. There's five more uses for varnish beyond the traditional. So one, filling gaps. Two, sealing after any step after thin glazes, contrast paint applications, primer, whatever. Three, smoothing out your white. Four, reducing the shine of a paint and or thinning it down. And five, painting your clear surfaces. So there you go. That's five additional uses for varnish. I hope you find this helpful. If you did, give it a like. That's certainly appreciated and helps more people find our videos, which I really greatly appreciate. Sharing this is the same thing. If you are sharing this, share and share a like. If you've got questions or comments, feel free to drop those down below. I always answer every comment. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. There's new videos here every Saturday. But as always, I thank you very much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.