There are provided an ink jet printing apparatus that can appropriately set drying intensity and a drying intensity setting method thereof. An ink jet printing apparatus includes a printing section that prints an image on a sheet with aqueous ink by an ink jet method, an ink drying section that dries the ink by heating the sheet having been subjected to printing, and a varnish coating section that coats the sheet of which the ink has been dried with UV varnish. The drying intensity of the ink drying section is set so that temperature where the sheet reaches is in a prescribed range. Regions corresponding to the same drawing conditions are extracted from an image to be printed, and drying intensity is set on the basis of a drawing condition corresponding to the maximum occupied area among the regions.