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This was an interesting read.

thank you very much

Vlad

Not surprised that the inks washed out.
They possibly use dyes rather than pigments.

Also not all pigments have the same lightfast qualities, and these may also be used in the inks.


are these the new washes rather than the old inks?
also how did the Vallejo inks hold up - sorry looking at the screen is making my eyes go wobbly

Thanks for the experiment and article- good work!

New washes yes. I did not test Vallejo inks. The full list of colours used can be seen in the article itself.

I'll go with that.

thanks, good read.

Great Read!

You are very dedicated!

Thanks for the article.

Perhaps washes that have had varnish applied, and see if that will fix the colour would be a good 2nd article.

Check again, I tested washes with varnish applied and it surprisingly and unfortunately had the same results. You can see it in the high res version of the final scan.

Varnishes will not help stop fading. As mentioned earlier it will be to the photosensitive nature of certain pigments or dyes.

Fortunately most models will not be kept out in prolonged exposure to direct sunlight. Just be careful with any prized builds on display.

Wow, excellent work - very interesting.

I would note that glass is opaque to UV light (which would be the most damaging to pigment stability), so the conditions are not the harshest that could be faced*.

However not many people display their minis outdoors so I doubt it's too much of an issue in real life

I don't think varnishes can ever help preserve paint colour from a photostabilty perspective - they'd only make a difference if they blocked certain wavelengths of light (which would make for an awful varnish)

Cheers again for the article - hats off to you for doing a solid investigation that nobody else had done!



*This is potentially a major issue, I suspect the fading mechanism would be energetic photons damaging pigment molecules, and that kind of mechanism is an all-or-nothing affair. If the photons aren't energetic enough to damage the pigment, they'll never have any effect. So if there's a sod's law thing going on and UV photons ARE just powerful enough to damage pigment then it might be significant...

You say that your results aren't "scientific"? Your method is as good as you can get outside of an industrial paint laboratory! I'm printing this and using it as an example of an experiment (I teach, and science fair is coming up!)

Great work!

Thank you for your time sir!

Really nice work! Thank you for that.

Most inks are metal based, and oxidize over time. the UV spectrum of light greatly speeds up this process- for some molecules more than others, however even if not exposed to light often it will happen as time goes on.

Much like how tattoos fade with time and exposure to light.