Lightfastness Tests -- Charvin Water Soluble Pastel Painting Sticks

In January, 2015, I made swatches of the 48 colors in the Charvin Water Soluble Pastel Painting Sticks set, and cut the strips down the center. I put half of each strip by a south-facing window of my studio, and the other half wrapped up in a dark closet. In another month, it will have been five years since I started the test. By art longevity standards, five years is not a long time.

In case you're not sure which pastels I'm referring to, above is a photo of the set. Here is a link to them on the Jerrys website. They claim to be pure pigment and lightfast. They are certainly well priced! As you can see in the image below, the colors are rated by the manufacturer, some as "**** Excellent" and some as "***Good". But if you know me, you know I often need to prove things for
myself, especially when it comes to claims of lightfastness.

The results are pretty self-explanatory by looking at the photos. To summarize, I am impressed with how well the four star Excellent-rated colors held their values and hues over time. However, many of those rated "Good" are actually Poor to Fair, and need to be tossed in the trash.

In order to see all of the tests together, I'll post them below without commenting in between the images. The White is not shown. It didn't change. The top half of each strip is the one that was in my window. The bottom half is the control, which was stored in the closet.

Summary:

The good news is that the earth colors and grays did not change. I plan to keep all of those. The yellow ochre is beautiful, and held up perfectly.

Only one blue showed significant change, in spite of the fact that most of the blues are rated only "***Good."  I'll be keeping all of them except that one, since they didn't show signs of fading in my tests.

Three of the greens I felt did well enough to hang onto. The others either lost much or all of their yellow component, or in one case lost blue.

Now for the really bad news. All of the pinks, reds and violets have got to go. The only bright yellow in the set is also completely fugitive, and nearly disappeared like a magic trick. (I'm sure it would be gone completely if left a few more years in the window!) Most of the yellow tints also faded.

If you happen to have this set, don't be too upset with the ones that failed. Just set them aside to use in your sketchbooks, or somewhere they won't be expose to light. Personally, I think the set is not a bad value for the 28 colors that I will continue to use, though I'd rather they sold it as a set of 28 lightfast pastels, and saved me the trouble of testing and having to remove the fugitive ones. If you own this set, you can make your own swatches, then click the images to enlarge for color matching purposes, and decide for yourself which ones you want to hang onto.

Are you wondering what would be a good alternative for those colors that proved fugitive in my testing? Well, I have some good news for you, because I tested some other pastel sets too! I couldn't photograph and post all of them today, simply due to lack of time, but I'll be putting other results up here over the next few weeks.

You can see all my Lightfastness Tests to date by clicking that category on the left side of my blog, or you can just click here.