Our Varnishes

In these pictures, one can see some examples of the cooking methods aiming at getting varnishes with a good natural of color, without the need of adding high quantities of pigments which, as we all know, enable us to obtain the color we want but take away luminosity and transparence.
Some of the tests have been carried out in collaboration with Prof. Claudio Canevari (in foto), who was in his young days a member of Guido’s ensemble.
The fundamental choice was to undergo a long cooking process of the resins, up to 40 hours with temperatures close to 300°C.
Different cooking times can give very different results, as you can see in the pictures “first resin” and “second resin”
After several months of tests, we have decided to adopt a larch resin which has been triturated after drying up together with heat-treated amber and afterwards diluted with Venetian trementine in order to obtain an easy color spreading.

At the end of a long series of tests, we have reached the best results with proportions of amber equal to 35% in weight of the triturated resin, while the delution was made by adding an amount of trementine equal to the 100% of the resins weight.

We have also carried out several trials with colophony but we are definitely happier with the results reached with the larch resin.
In the near future we would like to conduct new experiments tearing out coniferous barks directly from trees that we can find easily in our area and we will publish our results, if any of significant interest, in this webpage.