Venetian Plaster Step By Step With Firenze Marmorino

Step 1: The basecoat:

This is a basecoat for Marmorino Rivesto Fine. You notice he’s got a nova primer on the MDF board and he’s coming back and he’s covering that completely. He’s going to make this coat as smooth as he can. It can have some lines in. It can have some little variations. But you want to try to keep big lumps out if you can. Big straight lines, you want to keep those out, those are unnatural. So his motions are always almost like in a circular motion.

Step 2: The second coat:

Now we’re coming back with our second coat. Second coat is very, very important in Marmarino. He’s going to come back; he’s not going to apply too much pressure. We say that he’s almost trying to float the material on here. He’s trying to get it on there, covering up the white completely so you don’t see any white. He doesn’t want to overwork it, if you overwork it you cause the material to shine. And your subsequent coats don’t want to adhere properly. So he takes his trowel, he spreads it nice, not a whole lot of pressure. You don’t see a whole lot of pressure on his knuckles. You don’t see them turning white; he’s not breaking the trowel. He’s just spreading it out. When it’s done it should look like a flat, matte paint. It should not look like a Venetian plaster finish with high modeling and stuff; it should look like a flat, dry, matte paint. If that’s what it looks like after your second coat, you have succeeded. Your next coat will go on beautifully and you want it nice and smooth.

Step 3: The third coat:

His second is dried up, he’s coming back now with his third coat. You notice he’s coming back with a little bit of material on his trowel and he’s spreading and adding a little more pressure, you can see a little more pressure on his trowel. And he’s spreading it, now you’re beginning to see the different nuances of Venetian plaster. He applies and he comes back directly and he does a cross hatch. See? Cross-hatch. Applies and then a cross-hatch. He’s coming from the edges now so you won’t see that as much. But whenever he puts it in the middle, you’ll see he’ll put it down and cross-hatch. This smoothes out those edges, you never have a straight line going across, you want to avoid that as much as possible. You can see he’s pretty tight with his finish and he’s not using a whole lot of material either. Using one side of the trowel, this keeps crumbs from forming on the side that’s not used that often. And this is pretty tight, you can see it now, it’s got nice nuances on there.

Step 4: Apply protection soap

He’s going to take his varnishing trowel and make sure it’s completely dried. He has a rag with him, he comes back over, he compresses the material while he’s compressing he’s also polishing; he cleans it off. Make sure if you got any kind of sticky residue on there, take it off. Always compressing, you’re beginning to see it, I don’t know if you can see it on camera here but you’re beginning to get a nice sheen, cleans it off, nice and dry, this way you don’t pull. It’s already got a nice beautiful shine on it. And that’s a nice sample of Rivesto Marmarino. That’s without protection or any kind of waxes. The sheen comes from the material and the varnishing. Here, Gino is applying some of the Rivesto Marmarino impregnation paste. Soapstone, he applies with his trowel, puts on as much as it will accept. The Marmarino will only accept so much, the rest of it will sit on the top. You’ll come back with a rag and wipe off the excess.

Step 5: Thanks for watching:

You'll want to make sure that your material is completely dried or it gets kind of nasty looking. Make sure your material is dry then you apply your impregnation paste. Let it dry, adds a nice sheen to it, make the walls water resistant. And you want to clean it. Very, very nice finish.