Lightfastness Testing of Colored Pencils

> test, explain and research about something

There's more high quality engineering discipline in this 'non-engineering' article than in seemingly a lot of self-professed software engineering today ;)

I've noticed this as well -- at one point I had switched from Canon inkjet refills to a generic third party refills, and years later the photos from the knockoff have faded to an astonishing degree while the Canon ink prints look bright and vibrant.

Going through old photo albums that my parents have show a lot of fading as well, even though the pictures themselves were kept in photo albums in the dark for many years. We have negatives for some of those photos, which when scanned are bright and vibrant, but the prints vary significantly.

Crazy amount of effort here. Awesome.

I did this for a single color from a single printer—the black toner from my Brother laser printer. I left it in my West facing office window for about 18 months. On the BACK SIDE I labeled it with pen. The pen on the back faded to almost nothing but the toner did not fade at all.

I did not do monthly scans, that would have been a better "experiment", but I was satisfied that a B&W laser print would last a very long time.

Maybe I should lightfast test my Brother Laser and my HP Inkjet (with Black Pigment based ink).

I thought that pigment based inks would be both waterproof and lightfast. Since I started to airbrush watercolor over my HP prints I am now very aware that these pigment based inks are not waterproof, even after long drying times.

Red, in general, sucks.

Look at all the red-white-and-blue bumper stickers. They are usually white-and-blue.

Around here, we have school buses with a sticker on the back, announcing that they don't turn right on RED (with "RED" being in heavy letters, and colored red).

They frequently say that they don't turn right on.

There's:

1 header image

1 image showing in process

1 image explaining lightfastness

3 images explaining the importance of lightfastness

1 image explaining the measurement process

1 image linking to another article diving much deeper into the methodology

1 image linking to another article on a different color pencil concern (layering)

1 image representing each brand-line's lightfastness

Every single one of those images seemed relevant to the concept presented and clarified something that would have been difficult to articulate succinctly in writing. For example, the "how was this measured" is a lot easier to understand once you've seen the grid of squares before and after than it would be to try and articulate the fading of colors in small squares in text.

There's LOTS of individual images on specific brands, but given their wild degree of variance, I think it's really useful to perceptually see what's going on with each one.

I'm curious, where do you feel the images were "spammy"? It's a conclusion I heartily disagree with, but would love to understand.

Accelerated testing (6hrs/day) is standard practice in materials science - it compresses years of normal exposure into months while maintaining relative degradation patterns. Fixatives might alter results by adding UV inhibitors, but most artists want to know worst-case baseline performance.

What did you find spammy about the images? The ads for the artist's coloring books and calendars and such?

Although someone will challenge me on that, I'm 100% sure that large chunks of the text are AI-generated. That said, the website itself has been around at least since 2017 (the text just wasn't as verbose - e.g., https://sarahrenaeclark.com/diy-gift-bag/).

So, I suspect it's legit. It's a case of an author leaning on a crutch for writing, but we're here to judge the results, not the phasing.

She didn't even promoted a single pencil brand on the conclusion. She just shows the data and let the viewers decide.