shellac............

[vance galliher]

I'm using more shellac these days .....have read what Rick had to say....found this site interesting http://www.shellac.net/faq.html

[Danny Baronian]

Hi Vance,

what are you using the shellac for? If you have any pictures, post them.

Here's another one to look at on the Letterheads site:

http://www.theletterheads.com/glawson/shellac.html

Danny

[vance galliher]

Hi Danny
Rick's treatise is what I was referring to..........I use shellac as a barrier coat between solvent based products. Current project is LED carved glass..... applied a thin wash of asphatum (textured w/cling wrap) to clear glass area, shellaced over that, then quick sized for matte leaf. Without the shallec barrier, the size would just re-wet the asphatum leaving me with a tinted size rather than a distinct textured in front of my gold.

[Dan Seese]

Hi Vance,
That link you provided about shellac is helpful.

I used to use quite a bit of shellac as a barrier coat. I especially liked it as a backup to matte centers. After gilding, I would mix a little gold bronze powder in the shellac, brush it on and it would fill the holidays beautifully. Within 20 minutes or so I could go over that area with the final backup paint or any other decoration I was doing without attacking the paint underneath.

This has worked well on everything I've done for an interior application. Where I began to run into issues was with signs done on windows. Possibly, the temperature swings here in Colorado affect it, but I noticed on a couple of the windows I was doing that some of the gild would lift within a couple of months in the winter time. I finally decided that maybe there was a difference in compatibility between materials where shellac and One-Shot or Fine-Gold backup or whatever else I was using expanded & contracted at different rates.

Consequently, several years ago I quit using shellac on windows which will have an exterior surface. Haven't run into that problem since then.

I had a situation recenlty where I would like to have used shellac. I backed up the matte gild with varnish & then brushed bronzing powder onto the varnish when it reached a whistle-tack stage, which filled the holidays nicely. Then, wanting to finish before the day's end, I backed up everything with black Letterheads Supply Gilders backup.

Unfortunately, the backup paint caused the varnish underneath to wrinkle a bit. I sped the drying a little with a heat gun and then took some wax paper and ran a brayer over the whole thing which helped things to lay down a little better. It didn't show from the front of the glass & is not very noticable from the inside, so hopefully everything will be fine.

Apart from patience and returning the next morning, are there any other solutions to doing a final backup to avoid my little snafu?
Also, has anyone else run into incompatibility issues I described with shellac? From my discussions with Rick and article he wrote as well as the link Vance provided you get the impression that shellac is a magic bullet for everything from window gilding to world hunger, but my experience has been mixed.