Lightfastness Testing of Colored Pencils
Also I’m wondering is a fixer would help or hurt the testing. This is common with some art, like pastels.
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.
I've seen plenty of people "rate every X" in youtube videos or blogs before, this one is just more data oriented than most.
Second, while I know there are reasons to be skeptical about AI text checkers, the author's earlier (less verbose) style doesn't get flagged at all, while the style in more recent articles gets classified as heavily AI-assisted.
First, it just reads that way. It's the default style if you ask ChatGPT to write a couple of paragraphs that explain why lightfastness is important.
It doesn't read that way to me, and I've read lots of ChatGPT text. We've come to opposite conclusions, I'm curious what qualities you are identifying/keying off of?
edit: yeah, ran it through our style feature tagger and nothing jumps out. Low rate of nominalizations (ChatGPT loves those), only a few present participles, "that" as subject at a usual rate, usual number of adverbs, etc. (See table 3 of the paper.) No contractions, which is unusual for normal human writing but common when assuming a more formal tone. I think the author has just affected a particular style, perhaps deliberately.
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.
Foils (laminate or adhesive foils) or protective spray (UV) did not change the result at all. But one film tore and gave the whole thing an interesting, crackle-like appearance. However, the colors all faded in the same way, whatever protective used compared to direct exposure to sunlight.
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.
Inkjet manufacturers put a lot of effort into ink formulations and often these are better in terms of VoC and other parameters. Sometimes you find certain first party inks are not at all lightfast (like the ink for the Epson ET-3750 which I found fades badly in less than six months) but there is very little independent testing of ink performance. If there was there might be a market for ink that performs better than first party ink.
However, even though I balk at my 4515 for having dye based color inks, their fade resistance is astonishing.
HP always uses pigment based black inks on every inkjet, so text is always at archival quality on good paper.
But also, it's a fairly niche requirement to have a non-photo printed document need survive sunlight for years. I'd guess 95% plus of pages that get printed on a normal office printer have minimal need for colour precision, use crappy paper and go in the bin within the year or end up in an archive box, likely never to be seen by human eyes again.
I seldom print photos with my entry level HP inkjet, using HP inks. Even though my printer uses dye based color cartridges, none of the photos I print have faded even though they are framed and displayed 7/24/365. Ink is not colored water.
If you print/read/shred in two days, 3rd party ink and lower quality paper is OK, but if you want to be able to read or look at that thing after 10+ years, you need better quality paper and inks.
I use fountain pens a lot, and difference between ink quality becomes much more evident there. There are writing inks, there are archival inks (which are not Indian inks), and they behave totally different.
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.
It was just fun to see what someone who is deeply invested thought important to test, explain and research about something I'd have previously called a matter of aesthetic preference (as opposed to a thing you can benchmark).
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 ;)
Pigment color is a real heavy-duty field. There's a guy named Michael Wilcox[1] that is famous for his work on pigment color.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
[1] https://michaelwilcoxschoolofcolour.com/about-michael-wilcox... (Has an annoying popup on every page).
Pigment color is a real heavy-duty field
I'm not surprised. As $DAYJOB involves a reasonable amount of requirements for colour accurate previewing in a print context I still feel like I'm never as sure about all steps of the colour pipeline as I should be, and this adds a whole new area to know I'll never feel like I know enough about.
Here's a video interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd3hCBPqzYU
Turns out the drawings, some of which I actually sold, faded into oblivion within about a year. After slightly more careful reading of the actual standard, I learned that the drawings were supposed to be archived, i.e. kept in a box or a drawer, and not to be framed for full-time viewing pleasure.
The typical blue ink in the famous BIC ball-point pens (i.e. non-ISO 12757) turns black after some time of sunlight exposure, which seems fine.
About BIC, I thought I'd seens some tests online showing that over time the ink yellowed and eventually disappeared, so I've been avoiding them.
Clearly I need to look more deeply into it, especially for work I might sell.
Some contemporary artists sell digital prints, but if you are selling the real deal, at least ensure that it does not sit in full sunlight all day, because it will fade quickly.
In most museums original prints and drawings are often exhibited for short periods in darkened rooms. I think this takes away from the pleasure, and I prefer to see my art as perishables, which one can enjoy for a few years. An additional problem is that paper is terribly fragile stuff. Framing it (acid free paper) properly (with acid free tape) helps, but can be very expensive and will affect the aesthetics of course.
Some collectors of printmaking art store everything in a drawer and take it out once a year to enjoy it with a good glass of wine.
My only point of comparison is an etching which is a few hundred years old. The ink has no obvious signs of fading. It had some light restoration about forty years ago but we usually have it on display, at least in my life time.
When I've seen other prints of the same etching in galleries, they are usually in the same or slightly worse condition despite, probably, being kept much more carefully.
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.
The flag I got from the US Army in 1993 when my father passed away is still in great shape while many of them don’t look so good.
I tried the colors she recommended, and got good results. I also tested various black pens, and found (25 years ago!) that Micron pens were colorfast. Some black (gel, IIRC) pens faded to a nice sepia.
Many rose/fuschia colors are not lightfast. Pigments that are not permanent are called 'fugitive' in the arts. Rose madder and alizarin crimson are not lightfast. So are a lot of others: cochineal, geranium lake. That's why you see 'green' cherubs when you visit the Getty museum also why Van Gogh's paintings are not the color they were when he painted them. Most reds for art are now quinacridone or cadmium.
One of Windsor and Newton's (oldschool paint supply manufacturer, its fun to browse history on their website) most expensive paints is 'rose madder geniune.' They claim it is permanent but I don't know how they did it.
Note: x 'lake' means x dye turned into a pigment.
Fun fact: UV light makes tattoo particles smaller, which makes them easier for your lymphatic system to carry them to your lymph nodes. The particles are easy to transport into the lymph nodes, but difficult for your body to remove from your lymph nodes, meaning that for heavily tattooed people like myself, surgeries can be a potentially very colorful endeavor! (Or, if you have primarily black tattoos, it can be a spooky endeavor, I suppose.)