TIM BAKER

When I was shopping around for paint sticks after I realised that the KingArt ones were too expensive to ship over from the States, I realised that there weren’t any ratings or lightfastness tests for paintsticks. They are meant for kids after all – but as we found in the Great Lightfast Test, kid’s materials can be surprisingly lightfast. So I took a risk on other brands thinking that a lot of these tempera paint sticks look suspiciously similar – they can’t be all the same, can they?

Still I decided to put these rival brands to the test – it’s an ongoing thing, but here’s the results 2 1/2 months in – I put the KingArt ones in the window on the 29th April 2022 which they advertise as being lightfast, and the UK brand Little Brian Paint Sticks and the US make that I can actually get here, The Pencil Grip Kwik Stix Thins a week later.

I don’t know if many adult artists are using them, but I guess many kids are, and their parents might want to hang their drawings up…

The results are…shocking to say the least, especially given what a certain brand say about their lightfastness….

Paint Stick Lightfast Test Results

So, not as bad as I thought it might be, but look at how flourescent/neon orange and neon/flouro light blue just disappear in a few months! It’s good that I tend to use those colours as accents, although my sky pieces quite often use that light blue a lot, I need to stop that. Flourescent and neon colours are usually dyes, so they tend not to be lightfast, it’s something I was aware of. Neon green also seems to be fading a little also – I do use that sometimes for foliage. Must now avoid.

Same with neon yellow, that seems to be fading too, just not as dramatically. Neon pink might be going the same way too?

The shocking thing is the KingArt ones as they claim on the box and their site that these paint sticks are lightfast. I actually spoke to KingArt directly about the lightfastness of their paint sticks, they responded “The question referring to the lightfastness on the tempera sticks is best answerable with our product review section from multiple artist experience with the results.” – hmm. Very vague. And there isn’t anything about lightfastness on their site or their reviews bar their vague claim without any ratings or charts.

Which as I’ve just proven, is false.

So it turns out that their paint sticks aren’t all lightfast which is rather shocking given their claims and it’s even mentioned in an ArtNews review recommending them!

The other thing I suspected – that basically all these brands are rebranded or repackaged also bears out because look at the exact same colours – and the colours pretty much match across brands perfectly bar a few extra metallics in the Little Brian range – fading in the exact same way across them all. Same colour, same fading. Same sticks I suspect. If they were manufacturing different sticks with different pigments and dyes we’d see more variance and different fading across the brands, but we don’t. These are the same!

So the news for artists big or small for now – avoid the neons, and for everyone else, save your money on KingArt and buy a local brand or a cheaper one, they aren’t any different across all the brands I’ve used. Work the same, roll the same, paint the same, the colours look the same, and they fade the same.

So, not as bad as I expected but also not good the one brand I expected to be 100% lightfast (but was really suspicious of given the neons) was lying. It’s a good thing I didn’t spend £20 on shipping costs (as I was planning earlier in the year), there’s nothing special or ‘lightsafe’ about that brand. TBH I use the Little Brian ones interchangeably to replace the KingArt ones, and not noticed any difference!