What are some of your suggestions for a finish for a dried painting to seal? Would you recommend doing a spray matte finish?

    It depends what your objective is and what painting you plan to seal with varnish and where you plan to display it.
    Glossy varnishes - bring the subtle colors back to life, as with drying colors dull a bit and adds some playful depth. I use only this type.
    Matt varnish - will change nothing to the dried painting and will keep the sunken colors sunken.

    Satin is in the middle - I am hunting to get this type of varnish and compare to glossy ones. I think this type is a solution for all the problems of color brilliance restoration and glare removal.

    The little trick with glossy varnishes you need to make sure where the lighting goes in a display room as artificial lighting is a killer if glare cannot be managed.

    I guess if you are wondring about varnishing - you already gave 2-3 months of drying time for a thin layer oil painting. It is critical as if oil is not dry it will crack and what not. To preserve masterpiece for more years to come varnish only dried paintings. General recommendation about varnish is to do it after 6 months after finishing touches.

    Oh wow. The drying time is significantly longer than I thought it would be. I was thinking a couple days initially LOL. Can you tell I’m new at this?

    You will be alright, I am sure! This is just to master oil a lot of learning process is involved (pretty much like in anything new) and this is fascinating to find those “Aaaah” moments.

      Sunnylady I've had some success making mixing combinations of glossy and matte varnishes to dial in my own satin varnish suited to my preferences in terms of balancing of color brilliance and glare reduction.

          dracula what brands do you use? Any potential issues with mixing glossy and matte varnishes?

              Sunnylady I typically use Gamvar because it's what's easily available to me and they state explicitly that their varnishes can me mixed into new combinations. I'm tending to like 2:1 gloss to matte just to bring down some of the glare, though I am still experimenting.

                Just an FYI.. if you need to seal an oil painting fast.. like in 2-4 weeks for a viewing or you know it will be handled, then retouching varnish is the way to do it. I spray all my oils with it around the 6 week mark and what does is seal them to a degree and bring the colors back up like when they were wet. If end up keeping the painting longer, I can apply a permanent varnish later on.

                12 days later

                Wow!....what a difference, my son bought me some Winsor and Newton gloss varnish for christmas ,it's really brought my older paintings to life,the colours are so vibrant!

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