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After spending so much time and energy creating these portraits, I would hate to see them dull and crack due to my own negligence.
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Carrie,
Don't worry, your paintings should be fine for a long time. But I would caution about using a varnish intended for oils on acrylics. Some oil varnishes are not as flexible as acrylics and your attempt to avoid cracking might just cause cracks that would not have accrued at all if you just left it alone.
But any acrylic varnish that stays flexible will work fine. I use Krylon Crystal clear acrylic. Acrylic paint is very durable and if you used a professional brand of acrylics with a lightfastness rating (Liqutex is my brand of choice) you should not have to worry about any fading ether.
Acrylics should never crack (since they have not been around for hundreds of years like oils, I can't say what might happen centuries from now); they flex with the canvas, and once dry, they do not move or shrink like oils do as they cure.
You do not even need to varnish a acrylic painting at all if you do not want to. The dried acrylic paint is like plastic and as long as you do not use a strong solvent or a abrasive cleaner, it can be cleaned with soap and water with out affecting the paint layer at all. So a protective varnish is only just extra protection or to give a more even appearance to the painting surface.
I know many artists here who paint in oils, and swear by the archival quality of oils, might take exception to this, but acrylic paintings might just out-last oil paintings. And they will definitely out last any oil painting that was not painted correctly, following the rule of fat over lean, or was varnished too soon before the oil had sufficient time to cure.
Trust me, I have many illustrations painted with acrylics that were rolled and treated quite badly. (Not by me.) Once I deliver a painting to the art director and it goes out to pre-press, all kinds of nasty things happen to it. Once I get them back I just remount them on a new board and wipe them down with a damp rag, or some soap and water if they were extremely soiled. They all have survived the treatment quite well and they look today as good as they did when I finished painting them. (Except for the one that was actually cut with a xacto knife by a careless pre-press person.)