In the last year my sample set for violin varnish ground coat tests has grown to about 40. I may not have solved anything, but have come away with a full set of criteria that a nice varnish ground needs to meet.
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I’ve often used home-brewed pigments for varnish colors. When they’re finished, they are clumped, and sometimes gritty, in large pieces. To put them into varnish, one first needs to grind them to a fine powder.
This one’s interesting mainly because of its lack of great age: it’s from 1944, made in Hamburg, Germany; not a time and place you see many violins from. Usually I would associate this type of mud-crack surface with a soft varnish that’s been overcoated with something much harder (violating the painter’s fat over lean rule),
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Yesterday, I took a bunch of cheap bridges, scraped one side of each, and started putting a different violin varnish ground coat on each one as a way to test.
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A friend of mine brought in one of his older violins the other day. He uses a variation of my varnish that’s a bit more complex. His violin, which is around 15 years old and well-used, has acquired a really nice texture to it. It’s the most extreme on the ribs under the tailpiece, where
I have quite a few shots of varnish texture in my collection, such as this example from a Gand & Bernardel violin from the 1860s.
