Review: Clairefontaine Pastel Revolution Fixative

You know you have an art supply addiction problem when the owner of an art store personally WhatsApp you to tell you about the new arrival of a product. I have to admit, my heart skipped a beat when he messaged me about this item: Clairefontaine's Pastel Revolution.

This is a recent release by Clairefontaine that created quite a buzz in the pastel community. It claims to "freeze" pastels so that they will no longer smudge, to the extent that you can actually roll up your paper without affecting the artwork. 

No fixative on the market has been able to that to date (read my post on fixatives). Even the best fixatives can only reduce smudging, but not completely make pastels immovable. This is one of the downsides of pastel paintings - smudging makes them more fragile when it comes to storing and shipping of artworks. So as you can imagine, pastellists became pretty excited about this news. I got even more optimistic when I saw a demo of it on Jason Morgan's YouTube channel, and it seemed to work as promised.

I'd been dying to try it but shipping from overseas was an impossibility since it's an aerosol product, and not allowed on planes. So when I received the news that Overjoyed had brought in a shipment, I was delighted and quickly bought a bottle. 

I'm going to keep the conclusion short - it simply did not work. I tried it on various types of paper - Pastelmat, Canson Mi-Teintes Touch, Velour, UArt, regular Mi-Teintes. I sprayed liberal amounts and when the smudging remained, I sprayed a second layer. None of it worked. I was quite gutted. The smudging reduced somewhat, but not significantly. In terms of performance, it worked similarly to Daler Rowney's Perfix, which is a fraction of the price.

I have to say I've never been so disappointed by a product, maybe because I expected so much from it. I don't know why the results I got were so different from Jason Morgan's but a game-changer, this is not. I did a video review to show the results I got from two types of paper, so you can see it for yourself. All the artworks were done using soft pastel sticks from various brands.

I don't recommend this fixative but if you would like to try it for yourself, you can buy it from Overjoyed at S$19.90 for a 200ml bottle.