Who Knew?

I was watching Coffee and Art in the Morning on Ustream the other day (love this show) and the lady was talking about varnishing her acrylic work.
She explained that in her art journal it kept the pages from sticking and that it gave a nice finish to her other work. She said she varnished her professional canvases, and so she started to varnish her mix media works also. I went out and bought some Delta Ceramcoat Gloss exterior/interior varnish to try.
I then watched some videos on YouTube regarding varnishing. One of the people I listened to said the varnish helps to keep dust from getting on the canvas and it also made dark colors pop. I varnished some tags that I had made that kept sticking together and it does seem to help eliminate that. I wanted to varnish a postcard that I made but didn't want to mess it up. I had two mini canvases I had done in 2013 that had not been varnished. I got one and applied a coat of varnish to it. I then went out and got the other canvas to varnish and noticed the difference in the two so I took a scan of them side by side to post before I varnish the other one. I think I will apply another coat to the first one and see how that compares to just one coat.
Here are the canvases, kind of a before and after:

These were done as a pair with the same paints used in both. Not only do the dark colors now look more vibrant, the metallic paint shows up better also. The white even looks brighter. Who knew?