 Yee-haw! Welcome to Monet Café. Today we're gonna have a fixative showdown. Yee-haw! Our first fixative is La Tour, made by Sennelier, which boasts that it does not darken the final pastel painting. Next in the lineup is Degas Fixative, made by Spectra Fix. This fixative boasts that it is odor-free, non-toxic, and all-natural. The next iron rebarment is Blair Fixative. Now, unfortunately, this fixative is discontinued, but I thought I'd go ahead and compare it to the others. The final gunslinger in this rowdy bunch is Krylon Fine Art Fixative. Our competitors are ready, so let's start this showdown. Yee-haw! Hello, artists, and welcome to the fixative showdown. I've got my four competitors here, and I think you're gonna learn a lot. I learned a lot by comparing and contrasting these fixatives. Now, if you don't know already, often pastel artists do not like to spray their final painting with fixative. It's a question I get all the time on my YouTube channel. How do you protect your pastel painting? Do you spray it with fixative? The reason that I don't and many pastel artists don't is because it darkens the final painting, usually substantially. But I've found some ways to use fixative that can get a little bit of a final coat without too much darkening. I was pleasantly surprised with one of them. Actually, two of these are ones that I lean towards, and I'm really happy with their results. So, come on in the studio with me. Let's get ready for this showdown, and here we go. The surface I'm using is Canson Métince Pastel Paper. This is an unsanded pastel paper, and this is the Earth Tones Pad. For this first demonstration where I'll be testing different fixatives, I'll be using a set of pastels that's made by Giraud. It's a French-made pastel. I really like them. And now, let's get started. So, what I'm doing here is I'm just going to make two different rows of pastels, duplicating the colors on the top and the bottom. And I will be spraying different fixatives to compare and contrast some of the differences between these four fixatives. The first fixative that I will spray is the La Tour fixative made by Sennelier. I used this recently in a tutorial, and it was the first time I had used it. I really liked it, and I'm going to take it outside, actually. I'm going to breathe this, and I'm going to spray the bottom row. Unfortunately, I missed a little bit of footage, so ignore the little marks there. I'm going to show you more about that, but this is after one coat. You can see it really didn't darken it. Compare it to the top row there, and I was amazed. It also doesn't curl your paper very much. Now, I'm spraying a second coat. I decided just to spray it in my studio. I turned on my fan, so I didn't have to breathe it too much. I'm doing this in slow motion. But what I'm doing is doing a second coat in the bottom row, and I think you'll be able to see that when it dries, even after two coats, it's really not much of a change from the top row. That's one of the biggest complaints about fixatives is that it darkens the pastels, and I think you'll see when this dries, there is minimal darkening. Now, watch. You're going to see it when it's dry right now. Look at that. This is after two coats, and it's virtually the same as the top row. Now, I'd like to give you a little demonstration of why we use fixatives during the working phases of a painting. Again, ignore those other two colors where I had made some marks, then missed the footage. But here, what I'm doing is I'm making some marks. This lower one is the one with the fixative. The upper one has no fixative applied. See if you can see the difference between the two. The top one with no fixative is more blended. My marks actually blended the pastel underneath. The bottom one with the Latour fixative literally set or fixed the pastel underneath to be able to apply markmaking. That's one of the reasons that we use workable fixative during a painting process. I'm going to do this on a couple more for you to be able to see the differences. Here is the one with no fixative applied, and now let me make some marks on the lower one with the two coats of Latour fixative. Same zigzaggy marks I made and look. Not only does it not blend the pastel underneath, but the mark is much more crisp and fresh. And now I'm going to spray two more fixatives. Remember, the top row has not had any fixative sprayed yet. This is the Blair. Again, this is discontinued, and I used to use this for my paintings during the working phases, never at the end, but look at how it came out of the can so fast. I totally forgot that it comes out that quickly, and it left a big blob on my surface. So you definitely want to keep this can far away when you spray it. It's taking a long time to dry. I think you're probably already seeing the difference from the Latour that I sprayed on the bottom row. Now let's use the Krylon Fine Art Fixative. I'm going to spray this on the top row on the other side, and I've got my fan going and actually opened my window, so I don't have to breathe all of this. And it came out more smoothly, better than the Blair, but I still saw a darkening with both of these, a bit more, a color change, more than with the Latour. I think you can see, if you look at the pink specifically, see how much lighter it is on the bottom one. That has two coats of Latour versus the Krylon at the top. And now let's move on to competitor number four, which is the Spectra Fix. It's called Dega Fixative, and I do love that this is odor-free, non-toxic, all-natural. You don't have to worry about breathing it. Still don't try to breathe it, but I know it's probably not a totally fair comparison, but because the Sennelier Latour didn't darken that bottom row very much, I'm spraying the Fixative, the Dega Fixative down there on those pink and red and orange and yellow bottom row. Now, it did come out a little more quickly than the Latour. My paper is curling more. It did take longer to dry, but once it dried, that curl did kind of flatten out, and there was a slight darkening. I'm sorry I missed the footage of when it's actually dry, but I'm going to show you a whole example right now using just the Dega Fixative. Here is a completed painting I did for my Patreon page, for my patrons, and for this painting I used Pastel Matte. It's a professional pastel paper, and this time I'm using the Dega Fixative that has the Pump Sprayer. I do recommend the first Dega Fixative I showed that has the Fine Mist Sprayer, but with this one it worked fine too. I'm just misting this painting, a completed painting, with this Pump Sprayer of the Dega Fixative, just little spritzes, and you're going to see me apply four coats. I'm going to use a blow dryer in between to speed things up a little bit, and there wasn't much darkening, maybe just a little, and it also didn't curl as much because this paper is thicker. Now, this is the second application. Again, just a light mist. I did blow it dry. I just didn't show that footage, and now here is the third application. My goal with this experiment was to see if we could create a pastel painting that literally doesn't have any pastel rubbing off. At this point, it did still have a little pastel that came off. I'm going to experiment some more. I'm going to apply a fourth application. I'm just giving a light mist again, and I will blow it dry once more. Just to be safe, I'm going to do a fifth application. I'm not sure how much you can tell from a video, but it is darkening the painting. Not really bad, though. I'm going to blow it dry one final time, and here comes my big test. I know that's been a goal for pastel artists. Can we create a pastel painting that we could literally maybe just mount and hang on the wall? Let's give this one a test after five applications. I'm just going to rub my hand right across this pastel painting. Nothing blended, and look at my hand. No pastels. That was quite impressive. I did still see a darkening. I still won't spray my final paintings, but I do love this fixative for a fixative to use during the working phases of a painting. Here, I'm just rubbing it more to show you some of the final results. One thing that is good about using some fixatives during the working phases is you do reduce the amount of pastel fall off or drop off, so your paintings are a little bit more secure with their pastels. Again, it's like a dream for many pastel artists, including myself, to be able to do something to our pastel paintings to where we could literally just mount them, like having an acrylic or an oil painting on a canvas on the wall without the need to put them under glass. And in a perfect world, we could fix our pastel paintings, trim them the way we wanted to, and mount them. I had this little wooden board that I could attach it to, and if I could mount it to something like this and perhaps, you know, just paint the edges or leave it the natural wood, wouldn't that be neat if we could just hang that on the wall and not worry about pastel falling off? I would love that, but I am still not going to take that risk because I don't want to risk darkening a final pastel painting. Here are a few other paintings where I have applied some of the Spectre Fixative, the Degas Fixative, and from now on, I'm also going to be using the Latour. I love the Latour by Sennelier. You can see here, I sprayed this little painting probably three times. It did darken it a little bit, but it does set the pastel so that it doesn't rub off. I store my paintings and storage in these clear bags and often the pastel dust will rub off on the bag so a little light coat of Fixative may help that situation. Now here's another painting of mine. It was a little Happy Snowman and I'm spraying it with some Spectre Fixative and the purpose of this demonstration is to show you that you can use Fixative to spray and then add more pastel on top. Sometimes if a pastel painting has been sitting in one of my bags for a while and I like it, just needs a little sprucing up, I can coat it with a little Fixative and add a fresh coat of pastels on top. And like the demonstration at the beginning where I showed using the Latour Fixative, what this does is it allows the pastels underneath to be more set in place so they're not going to get blended when you add fresh strokes. So this is a really neat way to just enhance your pastel paintings if they've been sitting around for a while. And here is one more demonstration using the Latour Fixative. Again, I'm recently a fan of this. This is from a tutorial on my Patreon page and I used again the Canson-Mittance pastel paper. There was a little bit of curling. It's not totally dry but once it dried out, it was nice and flat. Again, barely any darkening. And the reason I sprayed it in this pastel painting was I wanted to set these pastels. I'm going to be adding little birds on top on this little beach scene. So I didn't want the new strokes that I made adding the birds to blend and be kind of muted. So using a Fixative this way during the working phases of a painting will allow you to add fresh strokes that are colorful. Have you ever been painting something like say a field of flowers? And you're just not getting that pop of color. So this is a way that you can get fresh color by just adding a little light coat of Fixative to the surface of your painting. I actually added two coats of Latour Fixative to this painting. I wanted to fix the birds in place and also darken the foreground. Often foreground areas are a little darker anyway. So this allowed me to be able to go in and add another darker pastel on top of the birds. And because I'm working on an unsanded paper, often unsanded papers don't allow you to get many layers like professional sanded papers do. So using this Fixative during the working phases actually makes it behave a little bit more like a sanded surface. Adding the Fixative allowed me to add a bit more highlights on the waves and fresh color. So let's wrap up this Fixative showdown with the final results. In fourth place, Poor Blair Fixative it can't help that it's discontinued but I find a few strikes against this Fixative is it does darken the final image and the spray nozzle doesn't spray consistently. In third place is Krylon Fine Art Fixative of all of the Fixatives I found this had the strongest odor caused the paper to curl substantially and darkened the image a bit. In second place Degas Fixative made by Spectra Fix came writing up to the rescue What I love about this Fixative is it's all natural, odor-free non-toxic and safe to spray indoors. It also had minimal darkening and is great to use during the working phases of a pastel painting. And coming in first place is La Tour Fixative made by Sennelier It was a close call between Degas Fixative and La Tour Fixative but for me La Tour Fixative receives the gold sheriff's star mainly because of how little it darkens a pastel painting A big round of applause for all of the Fixatives who participated in this showdown. Let me know what you think, what your favorites are God Bless, Happy Trails and Happy Painting