Do This Before Giving a Painting to Your Client!

hi welcome back to my YouTube channel I'm George and today I'm going to show you a few final steps that I take once I finish the painting before I give that painting to my client so this is a finished painting I've done here of a dog called Rocko and if you're interested in seeing the video of me painting this dog portrait then I'll link that at the end of this video but if you've already watched that or you just want to know what do I do once I've finished the painting then I'm going to help

you by sharing my process of things that I do so I finished this painting a few weeks ago so it's touch dry and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to apply a layer of varnish to the painting so a lot of varnishes that you get you can't apply them to a painting until about 6 months when the oil paint is really dry because oil paint can feel touch dry relatively quickly but the paint actually keeps drying for a longer period of time and if you put on a varnish too soon a

few things can happen one as the paint dries it can cause the varnish to crack and the other thing is that the varnish can bond with the paint so if you have to ever take the varnish off the painting in the future to clean the painting if the varnish and the paint have bonded together then you'll take off some of the paint as well so the way round this is I'm going to be using an exhibition varnish and you can apply an exhibition varnish onto your painting once the painting is touch dry and the reason

I'd recommend varnishing your painting once you've finished is because when you apply a layer of varnish of gloss varnish to your painting it'll bring out the real deepness to your darks cuz what can happen with oil paint is as the paint dries the darks can become a bit matte and they look a bit gray and once you put a bit of gloss varnish on them they suddenly have that impact again and also the colors the saturation the chroma when you put varnish on top those come back out again as well so I'm going to be

using using this C Robinson's and Co exhibition varnish I bought this one for £550 from C art and it says here apply one coat to touch dry paintings as a temporary exhibition varnish no need to remove after 6 months a final picture varnish can be applied over the top of the exhibition varnish and I actually find a lot of the painting I varnished with this even after 6 months they still look shiny they still look good and you don't really need to Varnish them again so what I'm going to use to apply the varnish is

these little sponges rather than a brush I bought this pack just in my local Art Shop for £450 I always used to use a brush to apply the varnish and what would happen is often hairs of the brush would come out uh in in the varnish and it would look a bit messy whereas this is all foam so none of this is gonna break off and get stuck to the painting and they're quite good just to apply an even coat of varnish um I'm just going to pour a bit on here and that and then

once I've done that and as you can see the colors on the areas which again covered in the varnish suddenly all come back out and it has that really rich shiny appearance and you can really rub it in whilst it's wet and again it really is important to make certain you leave enough time for the painting to be touched dry because obviously what can happen is if the painting is still wet then the colors can run and then the varnish will pick up those colors and will glaze your painting with a color you may not

particularly want and there we go so it's good to check it under different light look at it from a few different angles sometimes what you might see is little bubbles in the varnish um but as long as you leave it on a flat surface they will uh evaporate and the varnish will have a nice even appearance to it so now that the varnish is drying on the painting I'm going to fill out one of these which is a certificate of authenticity and so what you want to put on here is the title of your painting

the medium the dimensions and the date that it was painted and this is one I just made it online and I've also written this um on there this certificate assures that the above painting is an original artwork purchased from the artist George Fredick Thomas and then I'm going to stick this on the back of the painting once I finished framing it okay so now I'm just going to write the title here Roo um medium oil on panel Dimensions it's 35 * 25 cm and the date let's put the 7th of the first 24 and then

here I'll just sign this and one final bit of advice um before you leave your painting out to dry is I'm just going to write here wet varnish uh and then leave this next to the painting just so my studio mate knows not to put anything on top of the painting or to pick it up and get his fingers stuck in the varnish because this varnish is going to stay very sticky for quite a while and also if you're uh painting at home and perhaps you've got cats and dogs around make certain that the painting

is in a place where they aren't going to get any of their hair onto your painting because the varnish is so sticky right now if you do get hair stuck in it it's going to be very difficult to get them out so I'm just going to leave this here so I've left my painting out to dry and it's nice and dry now I've kept the painting flat so that the varnish has dried nice and evenly and you can see here all of those bubbles which uh I'd seen when I put the varnish on have just

nicely disappeared and it's got a nice smooth layer of varnish over the painting so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to frame the painting so sometimes the client will want the painting unframed often I'll offer framed or unframed or sometimes I'll just offer the price including the frame sometimes I'll go to a framer and they'll help me select the frame you can get little corners of the frame and put it next to your painting and see which one looks best sometimes your client will want to be more involved in that process

and you can send them photos pH of the frames and if you're in London and you're looking for a good frames to go the one I normally use is the London framing studio in baty which is close to me and they do a really good job but in this case I'm actually using a website called easy frame like the name it's really easy to use you just go on there you enter the size of your painting in millimeters the height and the width and then you can upload your image and then you can try putting

these different frames on your painting so you can see the image and you can see the frame and it gives you a really nice idea of how the painting will look in the frame the great thing about them is they're very affordable and they've got a big range and also they're very quick normally takes me quicker to get a frame ordered online cut bespoke than it does to take the paint into the framer and then go and collect the painting when it's ready so this is the frame I've chosen they call it canaletto gold and

you can see at the back there's this space at the back to fit the painting and then they've got these little metal bits which are going to latch onto the back of the painting it also comes with some string and these little d-rings and screws so one thing I'd say it is important when you order the frame to make certain you take into account the size of the painting uh fitting in the back so I always add on just a few millimeters uh into those Dimensions they enter into the website and the reason for that

is that sometimes if I enter the exact size of the painting it can be a real struggle getting the painting into the frame so the painting I've done I painted on a 35 by 25 cm panel and I've ordered a frame which is 251 by uh 351 millim so that extra millimeter will help it fit in a bit easier let's get this painted in the frame and fix the frame up at the back to make it look nice and professional okay so I'm going to get the painting and I'm going to put put it into

the frame like this some you got to fiddle it a little bit just to get it in over these little metal bits like that then this board I'm going to take off the string and I'm actually going to take off this bit of paper as well as you can see it's lightly marked there now so I'm going to put that side facing down towards the back of the painting and again the board just pushing it in like that and I'm going to use an old pallet knife that isn't too uh flimsy this is quite a

sturdy one and I'm just going to push here and push all the metal uh bits down you could use your fingers but it might hurt a bit so using the Panet knife I find works best and one thing you do need to check when you order one of these frames online is the rebate depth How Deep The the back of the frame is because if you paint on say a stretched canvas where your canvas is quite thick it might be quite hard to fit the pain in in the back cuz these metal bits won't work

so now that I've got the back and board on the back of the painting you can see the dogs nicely in the frame I'm now going to stick the board in using this Frame as tape now the nice thing about this tape is that it's very sticky and it's slightly slick on the back so it's slightly shiny that's the sort of tape you want to use uh I would like to be able to suggest where to get it online but I've tried buying it online and the tape has ended up being matte so I normally

say go to an art shop feel the tape if it's nice and smooth on the back then this is the one frame is typically use as well okay and then I'm just going to stick it I'm going to use this line which was sort of built into the frame and if I just cover that line then I know I'm going to be nice and even all the way around then these scissors aren't great cuz they're a bit sticky and they're a bit small but uh they're going to have to do so I'm going to stick

down both sides first here and I'm just sort of lining them up along that line so that I know they'll look even I'm going to use the scissors just to cut nice straight line so now I'm going to attach this string uh onto the back of the painting so that way the frame can hang on a hook on the wall so it's important to make certain you know which way is the right way up and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the uh screws and d-rings into the back of the

frame and I want it so it's about a third down the painting not bang in the middle a bit closer to the top of the painting um so I'm I'm going to do just going to use this pencil uh which is about the right sort of height whatever measurement you go for uh the point has to be exactly the same on each side of the frame otherwise the painting is going to be a bit wonky so just going to Mark the very bottom of this pencil here and the same thing again on this side what

I'm going to do now is I'm just going to screw it in slightly um so I can get a decent bit there then unscrew it and do the same here just so I've got a a sort of hole and then I'm going to put the d-wings the good thing is the wood is quite soft so you can just use a screwdriver and screw straight into the wood you don't need to use a drill or anything like that and I'm just going to do a bow here at the back and I'm going to double knot that

so that it won't come undone and then I can cut off some of this excess string so it's good to make it um quite tight so that the painting doesn't hang too far from the wall just like that so now I'm going to stick the certificate of authenticity onto the back of the painting I want to make certain that this also is the right way up so that when you twist the painting round it's not going to be upside down and what I'm going to do to stick this down is I'm going to use this

double-sided sticky tape I find it sticks really nicely to the back uh it's a lot easier than using glue and it looks nicer than sticking sort of s tape around the edges of the certificate so you can just cut out a bit of this tape I'm going to do this on each side so that it stays nice and secure to the back of the painting and you can just stick it down like this and then using your thumbnail you can peel it off so I hope you enjoyed that video if you did please do give

it a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel hopefully that was useful me showing you what I do uh before I give the painting to my client so now it's all nice and framed it's varnished and it's got that certificate of authenticity on the back and that string so the client can hang it up nicely on the wall if you're an artist and there's other things you do to your painting before you hand it over to your client or put it into an exhibition then comment below cuz it'd be nice to

hear your process as well and thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video