Giving Life to the Heirloom - Part 2 of 2

support for this video comes from skillshare which offers thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people on topics including illustration design photography video freelancing and more [Music] so we're back and in the last episode we did a lot of undoing cleaning of the painting removing all of the old work and preparing it for the redoing which is where this episode picks up and before i can put the painting back on the stretcher i'm going to take a moment to clean it off there's a lot of paper tape that was glued down to the back of the support and this is just a little messy it requires a little bit of water to soften up this old adhesive and a pallet knife to scrape it off this is not essential to any work i do this is not going to have any structural impact on the painting and it's not going to make it look any better but my clients want this painting conserved and part of that is to make sure that all aspects of the artwork as an image and as an object are well preserved this is also an opportunity for me to examine the support to make sure that there is no damage sometimes just going over it with a cursory glance we can miss things like cracks or other weaknesses that will fail later on so by taking some time to clean it off i can get a little bit closer to it and make sure that there aren't any other issues that need to be addressed now as usual before i put the painting on the stretcher i square up the support and drive some nails into and through the loose corners where the joints are this will make sure that the support stays square because of course i don't want it deforming when i'm actually stretching the canvas to it now with the stretcher cleaned and squared up i can lay the canvas down onto the support and align it just so now in this painting there are no tacking edges so the image that we see goes all the way to the edge so it's fairly straightforward and simple i'm going to lay out some of my tacks no i'm not going to spit them this time because it's a relatively small painting and i don't need that many i also don't need to maneuver around a large canvas so i can leave them on the table and use my magnetic tacking hammer to pick them up and drive them into the canvas and the wood now i always put tacks in the center of all four sides while giving a little tension to make sure the canvas is taut now this canvas wasn't interleaved so making sure it's under enough tension is actually pretty important sometimes i'll use a pulling pliers which are on the table but because this is a relatively small painting i can just use my hands and exert enough force on the canvas to make sure that there's good tension now i can always add more tension later on with the keys but adding tension here is one way that i can ensure that there are no ripples or waves or other deformations in the canvas and that i don't have to correct for them later on with the keys now once the painting is fully tacked i can start to clean up the back and all of the excess canvas and that starts just by trimming it off at the corners and then more trimming and more trimming and of course more trimming it's always easier to do this after the painting is stretched than to try and cut the canvas to a perfect size before the lining inevitably that never works ask me how i know so this is a method that even though it results in a little bit more waste it results in a better product in the end and actually some of these little strips of canvas can be used later on for other things like filling in missing pieces or as tests for various treatments that i want to experiment with now of course instead of just gluing down or cutting off this canvas at the edge i like to save it and tack it on the back with slightly smaller tacks i think it looks nice and it probably does provide some ancillary benefit with respect to keeping the painting under tension although i'm not really sure that that would be counted on as a feature i just think it looks nice to have the canvas tidied up like this and so once i've done all four of these sides i can finish up by tucking in the corners just like you would if you made a bed make sure they're nice and crisp and tidy everybody will sleep better at night that way including me and a few tacks will hold them in place and then i can move on to adding the keys into this stretcher now this stretcher is a little bit different than many that i've seen and showcased on my channel while it does allow for eight keys two in each corner the main key is recessed into a little mortise and those go in fairly easily that's the one that i'm putting in now and of course you'll notice the hole for the fishing line later on but the secondary key is kind of open and so this one while necessary kind of has a tendency of popping out so i used a little bit thicker piece of wood a piece of walnut there just to make sure that it didn't slide out that there was enough surface friction and tension on the piece of wood so that it held in place but just in case it does fall out this little fishing line will make sure that it doesn't get lost or find its way behind the canvas now because this painting has a lot of retouching it's necessary to put on a synthetic resin layer isolation coating and you've heard me talk a lot about why it is and isn't necessary and that's really just based on the painting itself and what challenges i'll face during the retouching or what challenges the paint layer presents with respect to the various varnishes that i use now in this case because the majority of the retouching is going to be in these dark brown black greenish reddish areas these kind of washes and glazes those are really hard to retouch not only is it difficult to see the actual color but depending on the light that is the time of day or the time of year they can shift and those colors can look more black or more brown or warmer or cooler and so this resin layer will help me see those colors more true that is the way that these colors look now as i'm applying this resin is how they'll look when the final varnish is applied and so it allows me to match the color on my brush with what will ultimately be the final color when the painting is varnished and so it just ensures that my retouching is going to be more accurate which makes me spend less time on the retouching reduces the amount of touching up i have to do after the painting is varnished and overall gives a better final result so it's a step that in this painting is actually pretty critical it doesn't really have anything to do with protecting the painting or making sure that the final varnish doesn't come into contact with the original paint layer this is really about aiding the conservator me in the next step of the retouching now there is some great synergy in the fact that the title of this video is called giving life to the heirloom because the retouching process is really where the image is reborn it's a renaissance so to speak of the artist's intent and thinking about rebirth renaissance or just becoming more whole has me thinking about those things that i want to do to make myself more rounded or just to complete who i want to be and among the horizons i'd like to expand well i'd like to learn 3d modeling so that i can better design tools and supports for projects in the future and of course the place that i'm going to do that is skillshare and yeah you've heard me pitch for skillshare before but it's true there is no better place to expand your horizons indulge in your creativity or simply try something new maybe there's a skill you'd like to add to your repertoire or perhaps there's something you've always wanted to learn how to do but just didn't know where to start or if you're like most of us you got a little bit extra free time lately and maybe you'd like to make it productive okay so maybe 3d modeling isn't for you and you'd like to have something more tangible well how about knitting i mean it's winter after all and a nice warm scarf seems pretty good right about now or maybe you're not looking for something warm and fuzzy on the outside but warm and fuzzy on the inside and meditation seems like it might fit the bill or perhaps you're looking for a way to get in touch with all the feelings that we have lately and poetry is a great way to do that maybe your self-expression comes with more sawdust so why not give woodworking a try you get to make a mess and feel really good about it too and speaking of feeling good nobody feels bad with a full belly so why not learn how to make dishes from scratch and if you're just looking for something fun i got one word for you juggling and the best part is that the first 1000 people who click on the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium that's right free it doesn't cost you a thing so you have zero excuses for not checking it out so on to the actual retouching now instead of using oil paints i'm using paints designed specifically for conservation and they don't have any oil in them they use a resin and that resin can be reactivated with a solvent the same one that i would use to remove the retouching if ever needed and the benefit here is that while my palette looks messy i can reuse all of those colors and it allows me to jump ahead and kind of skip one step of having to mix the base color now even though i can reactivate and reuse those colors they may not be perfect so i will lay down a couple of dots and just check to make sure that it's in the range of where i want to be and if not i can go ahead and adjust make it warmer or cooler darker or lighter whatever is needed to make sure i have a good match now it's not necessary that i get the match perfect on the first try because i can always go over and layer on my retouching now one thing that makes working with flesh tones particularly faces really difficult is that this was all blended on the canvas so unlike let's say a modern painting or even an impressionist painting where there's a pretty clear delineation between colors and brush strokes here all of the brush work has been smoothed out and the colors have all been blended together and when the artist blends them wet on wet well it looks really beautiful but it takes maybe two or three colors and turns it into 20 or 30 colors that is in the blending the color gets mixed and it changes ever so slightly from millimeter to millimeter basically what i'm saying is that it is a very smooth transition from color to color and while that looks great on the painting it's incredibly hard to match and one of the reasons is because my paints don't really blend all that well you see unlike oil paints these don't have a long open time they don't stay wet very long in fact by the time i go back to the palette recharge my brush and come back to the painting well the color i previously laid down has already dried so i either have to work really really fast or i have to use some additives which i'm not really a big fan of because they can make the paint dry uneven or change over time or i have to take another approach of constantly be changing the color that i'm using and using lots of little dots so that while it may not be a perfectly smooth blended transition our eye can perceive it as such much the way that a half toned image works when you see a gradation it's not a very smooth gradation just a composition of millions of little dots that your eye observes and your brain processes as a smooth transition and so that's kind of how i have to work and so i will just slowly work my way through changing the color adding some dots changing the color again until i have something that i feel is accurate and what i lay down on the first pass may not be perfect in fact it's likely that it's not and i can come back later on maybe in an hour maybe in a day maybe after i've applied the final varnish just to do some corrective retouching so even though i like to get it as close to bullseye on the first shot it's not absolutely necessary and there's always the ability to come back in later and correct it however it now in areas like this ear where a substantial part of the actual content is missing it's a little bit trickier now i know what an ear looks like and in this case it's just the lobe that's missing but i still have to create one so that the painting looks whole now of course i'll take my color cues and brush work from the surrounding paint in this case there really isn't any brush work to be mindful of because it's all very smooth and the colors well i'm already working with them but deciding how to recreate part of an image that is no longer there when you have no references well that's where it gets tricky because my interpretation of what this ear should look like may not be what another conservator's interpretation would be or what the viewer expects maybe this child is a girl and had an earring well there's no evidence of that so i'm not going to put one in basically what i'm going to try to do is create the most benign innocuous reconstruction of what an ear looks like so that it just kind of disappears i don't want this to be the focus of the painting it isn't the focus of the painting it never was and it shouldn't be so i'm not going to do anything that stands out and while my recreation of this lobe may not be 100 accurate if nobody ever notices or questions why the ear looks like that well then the work that i've done is perfect even if the ear itself isn't does that make sense if i can camouflage it well enough so that nobody ever takes notice of it then really my job is done because previously everyone would notice the damage and now well it kind of just looks like an ear which is what it always was supposed to look like and so in those cases i have to moderate my expectations and the target to which i'm aiming it's different for every painting and every area of retouching but in this case really i just want to make the damage disappear so that we can enjoy the more important parts of the painting like the lips nose eyes and expression of this beautiful young child now the retouching process for a painting even as small as this one can be really intense so i like to take a lot of breaks in between particularly if i'm having a hard time or if things just aren't feeling great maybe i'll even just stop and work on something else but when i'm on a roll i want to keep that momentum going particularly if i'm working with a particular color or one certain area of the painting like the face and it's really tempting to over retouch now there are some areas like this little chip that clearly need to be addressed but there are other areas like those little hairline cracks that one could get very carried away and retouch all of them or start to nitpick about them but we have to keep in mind that this camera is zoomed very close in to this painting and that those hairline cracks really aren't visible when you step back from the painting once you're about 12 to 16 inches away well they just disappear and so nitpicking over them and getting crazy with the amount of retouching that one does may not be the best approach so it's always good to keep that in mind now i mentioned that there was a lot of unexpected retouching in the background and yeah there was and so here are some stills that were taken during the process of retouching the background it wasn't particularly exciting or all that worthy of filming i'm just kind of laying down browns and blacks in the background i'm not recreating anything and frankly a brownish blackish background isn't the most exciting thing to look at but it's important nonetheless because as we can see as i work through these areas of retouching and slowly make them disappear the painting starts to come together and the stuff that was flattening the space all those little white marks and areas of missing paint as they disappear well the child the portrait starts to come forward into the light into focus and we start to get a sense of volume in the skin and the bone structure and the actual person who sat for this painting you see all of those little chips and damages in the background well they're really distracting i mean obviously they're really distracting but they disassemble the sense of space the sense of volume of light and of shape that the artists work so hard to create so if we go back to before the retouching and then jump ahead to after the retouching well it makes a big difference and finally after way more retouching than i thought this painting would have when i initially saw it and proposed it to my client i am finally finished and not a moment too soon because this retouching really does take a lot out of you and so now it's on to varnishing which is always a really exciting and also scary moment for me exciting because i finally get to see what the painting is going to look like but also scary because anything that didn't work if my colors are off or the texture's off well this is the moment that it's going to be truly revealed and of course i can fix it but it's always a bummer to have to go back and undo work that you previously thought was good now i'm using a synthetic resin varnish as opposed to a natural resin varnish for a lot of reasons among them this varnish does not yellow like natural resin does or at least no research studies have shown any yellowing in a simulated 102 years of testing in addition it's flexible so it doesn't crack or break like natural resin and it's also fully reversible with mild solvents so i don't have to use any of the harsh chemicals that i otherwise would to remove natural resins and finally it has an ultraviolet stabilizer in it so it prevents the resin from being corrupted by uv light but also from that uv light ever reaching the painting i've chosen to brush apply this varnish because it's a small painting and there's no reason to spray it and you'll notice that i never pour varnish directly on the surface of a painting and it's for one very simple reason it's really hard to put varnish back in the jar once it's on the surface of the painting i want a really thin coating of varnish and i can always add more if i need but to remove it if i've added too much well that's really difficult so pouring varnish on the painting is just silly there's no benefit to it now once i have laid down the varnish and spread it evenly i will start to do what i call brushing out and this is a process whereby as the varnish is drying and the solvent is evaporating the varnish gets stickier or stiffer and so i will go back and forth vertically and horizontally over this varnish continuing to distribute it but also to create micro scratches or micro texture in the top of the resin and what this does is allow for a diffusing of the light when it hits the surface and so as one approaches the painting and the light kind of hits it and bounces off it kind of glitters it's not super smooth like glass and it's also not matte it's not really semi-gloss or satin it's kind of well glittery is the right word and that's exactly what i want and i'm switching over to my badger hair brush as the varnish is reaching almost completely dry because the badger hair brush is much softer and it doesn't have any wet varnish on it so it won't leave marks in the final top coat this just allows me to get that really smooth really perfect finish i want so back and forth back and forth until the varnish is completely dry and then i'm done and i can just take a look to make sure i like it and yeah i like it now i mentioned that the varnish layer will reveal anything that i don't like and in this case there was something that i felt just didn't look quite the way i wanted it to it wasn't a wrong color or a texture that was wrong it was actually something that wasn't there cracks you see right here on the chest of the child well that retouching it just looks too perfect the color is accurate but all of the little cracks that surround it were missing and so your eye just went right to it and so this is one of those cases where by adding some damage or simulating some damage or wear i can better match the area that i've retouched to the rest of the painting so i'm using a pinstripers brush because they have ultra fine points they hold a lot of medium and they allow me to get really fine lines and i'm just using a very thinned out paint and i'm going to just kind of apply some cracks stuff that i think would look well natural there's no right or wrong way to do this you just kind of have to follow what exists there and work from that but as i start to build it it already starts to look better now it's not finished of course these cracks look a little too dark and a little thick so what i'm going to do is come back with my regular retouching brush and a little bit of transparent glaze and just break these cracks up a bit so they're not so strong again i'm super zoomed in on this area and zoomed out nobody will notice this and particularly if i work to break these cracks up they'll blend in even more which is just what i want all of this area to look natural and so after all of the undoing all of the redoing the retouching the varnishing the adding of the cracks the entirety of the work that i performed the painting is complete and we can see that it just looks right there's nothing distracting no textural problems the flaking paint has been addressed the old retouching has been removed the areas of instability have been stabilized and the painting is clean the surface grime is gone the old discolored varnish is gone and we can finally now enjoy the image as the artist saw it as the family remembers it we can give them back that experience of having this painting having it evoke within them emotions that they can't find elsewhere and that's really what it's all about and so while this is an unknown artist untitled painting with no provenance that doesn't really matter that it affects in the viewers and emotion well that's worth conserving and one final walkthrough the painting as it arrived in my studio in a perilous state with the sins of the past the heavy overpainting revealed under black light and the underlying damage revealed once we cleaned and removed all of that old retouching but then the painting came together when my work was done but if you're curious what my retouching looked like well there it is you can see it's much more reserved much less retouching compared to the retouching that was there originally again my retouching and all of my work can be undone so from that to that this heirloom has a new lease on life you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 723,141

Keywords: Baumgartner, Julian, restoration, ASMR, paintings, cleaning, scraping, repair, Art, fine art, conservation, painting restoration, old art, painting, painting conservation, oil painting, new again, restore

Id: Xz8DHOG9trI

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021