Framing and Caring for Your Coloured Pencil Drawings

By Carol Leather

A coloured pencil drawing is more delicate than it looks. The surface is soft and a little waxy, so it smudges, it attracts dust, and strong light will slowly fade even good pigments over the years. None of that is a reason to worry, because looking after one is simple and cheap. Most of it comes down to a couple of decisions you make on the day you hang it or put it away.

Keep it out of direct sunlight

This is the single most important thing, and it costs nothing. Daylight, and especially the ultraviolet in it, will fade pigments given enough time. Good artist-grade pencils resist this far better than cheap ones, which is what lightfastness ratings measure, but no pigment is completely immune to years of strong sun.

So when you choose where to hang a drawing, pick a wall that is shaded for most of the day rather than a bright south-facing window. An interior wall or a hallway is far kinder to your work than a sunny spot, however lovely the light looks.

Framing, the way coloured pencil likes it

Framing does two jobs: it shows the work off, and it shields it. A few choices make the difference between a frame that protects and one that slowly harms.

• UV-filtering glass or acrylic. This blocks much of the fading light before it ever reaches the drawing. Acrylic is lighter and will not shatter, which is useful if the piece has to travel, though it scratches more easily and can carry static.
• An acid-free mat and backing. Ordinary card yellows over time and can stain your paper. Acid-free board will not. Just as importantly, a mat lifts the glass up off the surface of the drawing.
• Keep the glass off the surface. This matters more for coloured pencil than for most media. The waxy surface can stick to glass in direct contact, and pressed flat against it the work is more prone to a cloudy film called wax bloom. The mat, or a set of slim spacers, keeps a small air gap between glass and drawing.
• Mount it securely so the paper cannot slip or buckle inside the frame.

To fix, or not to fix?

A final spray fixative can reduce smudging and help hold back wax bloom, and some artists swear by it. The trade-off is that fixative can slightly darken or dull your colours, so if you use one, test it on a scrap of the same paper with the same pencils first. Plenty of coloured pencil artists frame without any fixative at all and rely on the glass to do the protecting. More on fixative sprays here.

If a cloudy film appears

If a milky haze creeps over the darkest, most heavily layered areas of a finished drawing, that is wax bloom, and it is completely harmless. Buff it away very gently with a soft cloth or a ball of cotton wool and the colour comes straight back. Once the piece is framed under glass with a mat holding that air gap, any future bloom is left undisturbed behind the glass.

Storing work you have not framed

Not every drawing goes straight onto a wall, and unframed work needs a little care too.

• Store it flat, never rolled. Rolling cracks the pigment and is hard to undo.
• Interleave sheets with acid-free glassine or tissue so they cannot rub against one another and smudge.
• Keep them in a folder or portfolio, away from damp, heat and direct sun. A flat drawer or a slim portfolio case is ideal.

Do these few things and a drawing you are proud of today will look just as good in twenty years, which is rather the point of putting all those layers down in the first place.

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