March 31

I have got to find a better way to make a living. Working swingshift as a press operator is just way too hard. Usually when I have a bad day in printing someone else contributes and today was no exception. The details are too painful to relate here. Suffice it to say that they screwed up and I screwed up by not noticing that they screwed up. (They guided to the drive side and didn't mark it). Most of my problems stem from the fact that I work swing shift. My wife is raising my children. That's not right and I can't fix it. I feel locked in a straight jacket. I went for a walk around Tacoma tonight when I got out at midnight. I started out wishing someone would mug me. But by the second hill I was striding down the cobblestones feeling full of vim and vigor. The world was my oyster and all that. Right. Time to paint. I have a good studio peice I need to finish. To hell with this computer.

March 29

Life has been pretty tame lately. I've been putting in a lot of overtime (around 70 hours this week) running our Heidelberg GTOZ printing press. Now that I have a full weekend off it took until tonight,Sunday night, to relax. I was filing some bills and ran across some poetry I wrote 5 years ago on my 40th birthday:

Overtime Driving, Driving endless tailights darkness to darkness sunlight through the shop door a can blows down the road my daughters tender smile where've you been daddy?

Artists Lament Is it the vast sweep of visible time that makes me sad I've wasted mine? I've always sought the truth, tried to earn an honest living. Bitterness is much easier than clarity Am I truly driven to create lasting art? or do I just want to please? Am I just another faceless jack bringing home the bacon? Does it matter to the long sweep of time that I saw a clean pure beauty to the spin of electrons around an atom?

Self Portrait Mark Webster a name only for tissue and time water and amino acids with an appetite. Such worry over making it last the shadows of all who have come before overwhelm me they breathed, loved and died back through the centuries and forward for all time 'til death do us part.

Fracture It comes in pieces we assemble it with no directions when a part breaks, there's no warranty we muddle through. With you I thought I had perfection now I see you're broken too. I hope there's time to mend the peices for I'll never find another you.

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March 24

A couple of days ago I drew my hand on the black board at work. I have been into doing 10 minute self portraits of my hand ever since I read "Drawing on the right side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. Hands are extremely hard unless you have studied her book, or at least the first couple chapters which was as far as I got. Anyway, I have a tendency to grab a pencil or pen whenever I take a break and sketch my hand. It is always there, always challenging and always turns out different. I can tell when I am approaching the end of one of my long art blocks, I start to get an itch. The only way to scratch it is to draw something. So, I drew my hand on the lunchroom black board. I kind of felt like the cro-magnon cave painters must have felt as they labored deep in a smoky cave over an obscure drawing, wondering if anyone would ever find meaning in their labors.

The creative urge is a very strange thing. Sure, any kid knows painting and drawing is fun and does it unquestioningly. But as an adult, I think twice about drawing when I haven't sold anything in a while. There are so many other things I could do, like finish my taxes, balance my checkbook or read a good book etc. etc. I mean, why should I go to all that work when it will just go into the pile under the bed? But, I had the itch and that huge blackboard beckoned. I love to draw using the blind contour method where you draw without looking at your drawing, just trusting your hand-eye co-ordination for the line. It is a guaranteed method for bringing in the right brain and shutting up the critic in the left brain. My ten minute sketch turned out great. I knew someone would see my anonymous drawing and wonder over it.

Today, someone added a smoking cigarette. At first, I was offended. I would rather they just erased it. But, as I pondered, it occured to me that someone was communicating with me at some level. Since I work alone, I tend to get a little lonesome. So, I added another hand (still there 19 months later). I couldn't draw the other hand so I did another angle. I get an absurd pleasure doing public art. It survives or dies on it's own merit. The general public as a rule doesn't give a hoot about art and printers are no exception.

M y daughter was showing me her drawings last time I saw her. She has an amazing sense of color. Her felt tip pen color choices are as good or better than I could do. Both she and Clint have very good line control when copying from photographs. I was telling her how she is at that age where most peoples' art ability freezes for the rest of their life. I remember her slow smile as I reassured her that since I was an artist it was very likely she wouldn't get stuck at her current level. I explained how she had a head start on her friends who also dabble in art. Art is such a rare gift. I have no idea why I have been cursed with it. Why couldn't I get something useful like leprosy? At least with that, I could get someone to support me and I wouldn't have to live with this big guilt trip over not having time or energy to use the gift I have been so unwisely given.

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March 22

I recently got a free offer for Netscape Communicator version latest greatest. I lost Netscape when I sold my old computer to my Dad. I kind of missed having it around to test my HTML out for display errors. I have been reading a lot of anti-Bill propaganda and thought it might be neat to have an alternative to IE 4. When Netscape installed it took over my desktop. It grabbed onto all my favorites off my start button. Demanded to be the default browser. Then I discovered it was missing all kinds of plugins for video display, sound, etc. Plus, it killed IE 4. When I click on IE 4, I get an error message saying "This is not a valid Win 32 application". That made me so mad I deleted Netscape even though it was a large, long download. All the easy shortcuts for IE4 are dead now. I can still make it work by going through the Update feature as an awkward work-around. Boy, I wonder if Netscape designed Communicator to come in like that. It came onto my desktop like a wolf in a chicken pen, destroying every trace of IE 4 it could find. Even after I uninstalled it it still has a stranglehold on IE4.
I had a tiring weekend. I spent 5 hours Saturday working on my old computer at my dads trouble shooting a reluctant modem and helping him learn Windows 98. Then, Sunday, I worked on his web site for 2 or three hours. And I had to work Sunday night, tonight. The only bright spot in the weekend was my wife Sue. She was in fine form. How I ever wound up with such a great woman I will never know.

Out a' Work Again

March 17

Today I got fired. I was just starting to enjoy my new day shift job. I had been cutting for about 2 weeks. I had never worked as a paper cutter before, full time. I knew I couldn't possibly be fast enough just starting out on a new machine. I had hoped that I could at least be accurate. And in fact, I was extremely accurate, making one bad cut in 2 weeks. But, the price I paid for that anal retentive accuracy was cutting very slowly on anything complicated. One of the other main cutters makes at least one bad cut a day. But he is very fast, having run that machine, or one similar for over 20 years.

Our full time, professional paper cutter walked out on us two weeks ago. He had been going to school after work learning Pre-Press. The dirt-bag couldn't even give us one day of notice. I never liked him anyway. Guys that carry a purse rub me the wrong way. I never could figure J___ out. He had a beautiful wife and kids. Why does anybody these days need to dress like a hippy? I was a hippy when it was "real." I had the tipi, lived in the commune and refused to work on principle. We all beleived in free love and practiced it. Of course none of it would have been possible or even likely if we all hadn't been living in a haze of pot smoke. The reason I am stuck in this rut of blue collar jobs now is a direct result of my choice back then to live the "Real" hippy life for three years instead of taking advantage of the free college education my parents were offering.

But J___ walked the walk and talked the talk. He had the long greasy hair, the hand painted Volkswagen bus, the tie- died tee shirts, the ragged shorts and worst of all, that purse. The stupid thing looked exactly like the leather bags we used to carry paraphernalia in with the beaded peace sign and the leather tassles. I just couldn't figure it. Here he was, doing a very technical, efficient job in the printing industry, studying computer graphic design after work in Seattle. What was the point of the hippie act?

But back to being fired. I saw my boss walking around with a young scrawny stranger who was clearly familiar with a print shop. That took me about 5 seconds to figure out. My co-worker saw it instantly also and asked me who that was. I said I didn't know and didn't want to know. My boss walks up to me and says,

"Mark, this is ____. He is our new cutter operator. You're fired."

"Well, that didn't take very long," I said. He grinned. We both knew that the shop couldn't plug an important pressman into the cutter job for long before feeling the pinch in press production. Customers come to us because they know we (I) will be there on swing to clean up whatever day shift didn't get done plus my normally scheduled jobs on whichever press is busy. I looked over at the 7 or 8 jobs yet to cut on the schedule. I had been there 7 hours. A painfull memory of the nightmare 14 hour day yesterday passed briefly before my bloodshot eyes.

"Gee, if I am fired, that means I don't have to work overtime tonight"

"Well, actually the plan is you will come in at 1:30 tomorrow as a press dog."

"No, I like the sound of being fired. Unemployment insurance, springtime is coming, painting out in the sunshine...I don't know if I want to come back tomorrow. In fact, I am not sure I want to come back at all," I said with a grin.

"Say," the new guy asked, "How do you program this cutter?"

"I am just learning it myself" I said, turning to the keyboard and puzzling over the latest malfunction. The keyboard is way past needing an overhaul. I talked to them all for a few minutes, told my boss I'd see him tomorrow and punched out. Just another horror story in printing.

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March 15

My parents are having their 50th wedding anniversary this summer. My brother, my sister and I are working up a little something for them. I often wonder why this family, from my grandma on down, has been so lucky with marriages. Of the 16 marriages of the descendents of my Grandma Webster, that is, her children and their children, there have only been 2 divorces. One of those people got divorced twice and finally succeeded on the third try for 6 years now. And I just heard that there is a third divorce this month after over 20 years together by another cousin. One of the cousins even had a shotgun wedding in high school. Against all odds, they have made it stick for 14 years now. Why have we had such good luck when so many fail around us? Almost all of our kids' friends' parents are on their second marriages. My son has a hard time finding friends to ride with on the weekends. The boys are always at their dads house for the weekends.

My grandfather was a minister and a missionary in Alaska. I myself grew up in the Presbyterian Church. I really don't know if that has any bearing on stable marriages. I left the church in the ninth grade when I found that Hinduism made as much sense as Christianity. It was too confusing to weigh the merits of both of them so I said to heck with it all. Now, I don't believe in heaven and I don't believe in the tooth fairy. I think it is all right now. I think it was Tony Curtis who said,"I want to live my life so fully and completely that when death sneaks up like a thief in the night, their will be nothing left to steal."

But I can't deny the sense of community I enjoyed going to church all those years. I had good friends I saw twice a week for 5 years. We went on summer camps and weekend trips. They were always drilling us with the ten commandments. We went on youth group trips where we donated our time to help homeless people build houses. Perhaps some of that sticks. God knows though, none of us are saints, especially me with my three years of hitchhiking. Somewhere I read that a good marriage can only be learned by observation. For the sake of all the children of divorced parents out there today I hope that is not true. Time to hit the NyQuil. Cheers!

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March 14

I've been using a special blend of Nyquil and Southern Comfort to sleep for the last week. I have caught the cold/bronchitis that is going around. I had to take it at 10 pm and at 4 am last night. The 4 am dose was especially charming. As I was pouring out the NyQuil into the sticky little cup, I missed and poured it directly onto the sheets. I was so sick I fell asleep in it.
Yesterday I uploaded the first two chapters from my fathers unpublished Manuscript about the Nestucca oil spill near Grays Harbor about 10 years ago. There were a lot of stories in the press about the crowds of people who went down to Aberdeen and Westport to clean the oil off the birds. My dad got involved in that effort and wrote a book about it.
Both of my kids want to use this computer so I had better post this to the virtual world and and return to reality.
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March 12

Saturday morning 9AM. Boy, it's nice to wake up before noon without a swingshift headache. I have been learning to cut paper again. The last time I was good at cutting paper was back in 1986. Our bindery guy walked out on us 2 weeks ago. I offered to cut paper if it was dayshift. Running press is a lot more satisfying but I don't get to see my family. It is an interesting tradeoff, I can run press on swing shift and not see my family for 4 days in a row, or I can cut paper on day shift and see them every day. Well, I am willing to try it for a while. I have always wanted to learn how to program a paper cutter any way. Now I will have one more skill under my belt.
Our cockatiel is becoming quite a nuisance. He is sitting on my shoulder as I type this. He loves to scream in my ear. I would rather he work on his rendition of "Happy Birthday". He is missing a couple verses. He will get halfway through it, stumble and finish with a wolf whistle. He is only 5 months old so perhaps we can train him to have better manners. I am thankful I didn't spend $800 for the African Gray Parrot I initially wanted. If I have to walk away from this bird, it is only a $100 dollar mistake. Lots of things I would love to do this weekend but I'm down to $80 until Wednesday. I guess I will have to go out in the garage and paint some money.
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March 11

I've finally gotten used to day shift after four days. I really like seeing the morning light on the way to work. Parents are not meant to work at night. I can't believe I did it for 6 years. Well, actually there was an 8 month period of days a year ago but 2 months of that I was unemployed. The other 6 months I was working double shifts or commuting to Seattle. So this is the first good day shift job in 6 years. I am seriously considering never, under any circumstances, working nights again. I would rather work at seven eleven for minimum wage. Life is too short. Bright sunny day today.

March 7, 1 AM

This weekend I am trying to make the change from working swing to working days. Quite a challenge after a year. I should be in bed but here I am, sitting at this computer at one in the morning. I just checked out the new Opera browser. It is quite interesting. Definitely worth using for a while. It is an under 2 megabyte download. Costs under $40. I spent Saturday enjoying getting up in the morning instead of sleeping in until Noon. It was almost exotic having the whole day to spend with my family. My son and I hung a boxing speed bag in the garage. He loves Martial Arts. Not to much entertaining chaos to report.
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February 25, 1999

This winter has been a slow winter for me creatively. Pressures of job and family tend to make art take a back seat to life. Sometimes it is a lot easier to sit down at this computer after a long day of running around a printing press than to go out into the drafty garage and try to create another masterpiece. I am pining for the warm spring weather when I can get back outdoors with my easel. I have worked on a couple studio pieces recently. Shown below is a series of photos of a studio version I painted recently of a sold on-location painting I did last summer. I used a photo of the sold painting to blow up the image to 22"x 30". I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could recapture some of the excitement of painting on location while working out in the garage under the florescents.

I have been teaching myself a little Java script programming. I am planning to put mouseovers on my pages. I have no idea why I like tinkering with these pages. Sometimes it's better not to ask.

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Really Weird!

February 19

Today I got a plain manila envelope from the California State Highway Patrol. I panicked and searched my mind desperately for the last illegal thing I did in California. There was that illegal lane change in Joshua Tree, 6 years ago. Could it be a traffic court summons? I gingerly pried open the tape and found a musty old leather wallet inside with paisley patterns on the lining. I realized with a shock it was a wallet I lost in 1972 on a hitchhiking trip near Big Sur. I can just barely remember standing in a long line of hippies on the side of the road. We all had our thumbs out hoping to be interesting enough for a ride up the coast. I was coming home from a month long hitching trip to see a girlfriend in Frisco. I remember looking for my wallet. Talk about a trip down memory lane. There was my moldy original social security card, My drivers license card, look at that haircut! Plus a couple of rolling papers, now what could those have been for? And a lot of old miscellaneous receipts and notes about people who had given me rid es or hospitality on the road. There was even an REI membership refund for 3 dollars. There were a bunch of phone numbers of friends long lost in the mists of time. I couldn't help wondering what was going through the minds of the clerk at the Highway Patrol who finally decided to go to the trouble of finding my current address and returning my long lost wallet 28 years later. But hey, thank guys!

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February 10, Robbed!

Tonight I was working swing shift printing a book on the Heidelberg KORD. I was alone in the building just after lunch at 10PM. I saw someone waving in the window by the door where I park my car. I figured it was one of the salesmen or perhaps the typesetter coming in to work late. Sometimes they forget their shop key. I walked over to the window. I didn't recognize him. He was hollering though the barred locked window something about a tow truck. He was dressed nice, looked like a legitimate blue collar slave like myself. I bent down and slid the window back so we could talk through the security bars. He said his truck was broken down just over there, pointing. Said he worked next door at Air Systems which I am familiar with. Mentioned a couple names. They were working late, his foreman left and his truck died. The tow truck driver wanted $50 and he only had $37 in his pocket. Could I loan him $13 until his wife showed up at 11PM with his wallet. I said I normally don't hand out money to total strangers in the middle of the night when I am working alone. I asked him if he had any ID that proved he worked next door for Air Systems. He said no, it was all in his wallet that his wife was bringing down at 11PM when she got off work up at the hospital. Finally he offered me his coat, a nice lined fleece jobby. He said, "I know you don't trust me and I don't blame you. Take this coat as collateral."
Well folks, if he was lying, he deserved an oscar. I bought it hook line and sinker. I let him in, it was snowing outside, he follows me over to my lunch box and I hand him $15. I knew something was a little fishy when he started patting me on the back like he was just overjoyed to find someone who believed his story. As he was leaving and promising to return my money in an hour he said to be sure and leave my ear plugs out so I would hear him banging at the window. I told him that if he didn't return my money I would consider it my charity donation for the month. He shakes his head in amazement like, you still don't believe me?

As he was walking out he said, "Say, do you mind if I take my coat, its cold out there and I have to wait for the tow truck?" "Sure, I believe you, take it." I said and kissed my money goodbye. I waited until midnight before I realized I'd been taken for the proverbial ride. I later found out he'd taken one of the day shift guys for $25 last summer. Quite a career he's got.
The next day, no one could beleive I had let him in. I tried to explain how I was raised with the ten commandments and the golden rule, not to mention good karma, practice random unexplained acts of kindness, etc. etc. ad nauseatum. I guess I'm just a sucker. That really burns ya though. You think you are doing someone a good deed and they are just scamming you.

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Summer News, November 1998

This summer Daniel Smith, the well known Art Supply store based in Seattle reviewed my slides and asked me to do a demo in the store. I told them that I didn't feel qualified to teach others since I am self-taught. As a teenager I made the unfortunate choice to go walkabout instead of letting my parents pay for a college education. Ever since that fateful decision I have been slowly educating myReallyself while supporting my family as a blue-collar slave. Bill McEnroe, the well known Artist and retired Art Professor, and I have talked about this via email and I quote,

"If you are working full time, and painting on your own time as much as you can I wouldn't clutter up your life by adding teaching. It is a very time consuming, and exacting discipline, and if you aren't comfortable doing it, don't. Very few artists are good teachers-they can't use the left hand side of their brain and talk about what they are doing and simultaneously use the right hand side and be creative. I taught art for 32 years, a nd trained myself to do this, (and consider myself to be a good teacher), but it takes lots of hard work. Most people either paint, and are mute, or stop and talk and can't paint, and there's nothing more frustrating than watching a demonstration like this-or paying good money for a workshop where the teacher can't do both. So, forget it-don't steal time from your art."

Daniel Smith also offered me the chance to be their House artist at their booth at the Puyallup Fair one afternoon. I knew I could handle that due to my experience as an on location landscape painter. Painting at the fair didn't turn out to have much in common with painting outdoors. My easel was located in Daniel Smiths roped off area next to the Pacific Rim Wildlife Exhibit. There were some stunning paintings by world renowned artists of elephants from Africa priced in the $10,000 range.

So there I was, repainting one of my little $300 sold landscapes while trying to be informative and entertaining for the admiring public. I will have to admit being a little nervous also since I have never before been paid to entertain crowds. I was just getting comfortable with the steady stream of fair goers walking by when I heard a little girl shout, "Daddy, Daddy, look over there! , come on I want to see!" I looked up and here came the little girl, dragging her mom and dad, heading straight for me. Oh boy, I thought, here comes my moment in the sun. She walked right by me and up to the marvelous six foot tall painting of the elephants. After that happened about 5 times I settled down to work and actually finished a sellable painting. Daniel Smith gave me $20 in gift certificates for the three hours of work and I left feeling fairly depressed. The happy ending to this story is that two weeks later I found a $200 gift certificate from Daniel Smith in my mailbox. I recently went up and went hog-wild buying pastels.
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August, 98

I had a fairly challenging summer of painting. Twice in August I hiked up the Skyline Trail at Mt. Rainier into fog. The second time I had an unfinished painting from an interrupted session on the other side of the Mountain (Sunrise) in my backpack. I figured the fog might clear off if I was patient. I got out my Sunrise side painting and began finishing it from memory. While I was working there was a steady stream of tourists, hikers and climbers going by on the trail. It was pretty funny. They would come up over the rise and here was this guy painting the mountain in a white-out. The foreign speaking tourists were the best.

"Oh wow, so that is what Mt. Rainier looks like!"

I would reply, "No, this painting is from the other side of the mountain."

"What do you mean? How can you paint something that isn't there?"

"Well, I want to paint this side but it is foggy so I am finishing this painting from the Sunrise side from memory." One lady from Seattle studied my painting carefully for a couple minutes and said, "Gee, I don't remember the mountain looking like that." After a while I just said, "Yupp, that's Mt. Rainier all right." After those two trips in the fog I decided the Mountain was jinxed. On my next sunny weekend off I drove the family out to Kalaloch on the Washington coast. Saturday morning I shouldered my art pack and hiked down the trail to Ruby Beach. It was fogged in all day and all weekend. It was a good thing I brought a book. My kids built a man-trap in the sand complete with pungi-sticks. It is not surprising more people don't paint on location, it can be quite a trial. Pictured is the Sunrise side painting.

But it does pays to be persistent in on location painting. State of the Arts gallery in Olympia has sold 6 out of the last 7 mountain paintings and prints I have brought her. One of the most important lessons I learned painting up at Mt. Rainier this summer was to wait until the forecast was for Zero percent chance of rain. The same rules that apply to day-hiking apply to painting up there: Bring sunscreen, Mosquito repellent, water and extra clothes. I try to be at my viewpoint with my easel up by 1pm. My solution to the "weekend painter syndrome" is to use a viewing window first developed by Leon Baptista Alberti several hundred years ago. It consists of a piece of matt board about 7" by 10". I have cut a rectangular viewing window out of the center and strung 3 pieces of dental floss across both the vertical and horizontal directions. This divides the "viewfinder" into 16 squares. I lightly draw the same 16 squares on my sheet of blue tinted Rives BFK . Then I look through my viewfinder and make the mountain proportions on the paper match the mountain proportions intersected by the dental floss. This saves a lot of erasing. Once my rusty right brain wakes up I can put away the viewfinder and draw like a pro. Here is a half-finished painting showing the blue tinted Rives BFK paper. Note the 3 black vine charcoal marks on all four edges dividing the picture into sixteen squares. I have finished the underdrawing and am about five minutes into the color.

July, 98

I spend the first hour or two doing a vine charcoal rendering with a few white conte high lights. By three or four o'clock the boring white glaciers begin to take on the lovely alpenglow colors for which Rainier is famous. The shadows move quickly at 14,000 feet but since my under drawing is accurate I can concentrate on just throwing color for a couple hours. For emergencies I do carry a black and white Polaroid camera in case the fog rolls in and ruins my day. Sometimes I carry a 35mm SLR but have found the color prints to be quite useless compared to the visual feast of being there. I have found a lot of the prettiest passages in my paintings come from a relatively boring landscape where I have had to pick pastels and create color combinations that take on a life of their own with only vague resemblance's to the actual hues on my subject. That is why paintings cost more than photographs. The human mind can create while the camera can only record.

It is also a very artist friendly atmosphere up there on the mountain. There are always cute marmots running around not to mention a few bashful bears and elk. The vivid colors of the alpine meadows and tangy pine scent can only be found above 5000 feet. Beautiful people hike by now and then, reminding me of the days when the wife and I had the knees to climb mountains. I have noticed that around 90% of the public doesn't give a hoot about art. The remaining 10% are like Labrador hunting dogs. Their tail goes up in a point the second they see an artist working on location. From the minute they see me it is only a matter of time until they are breathing over my shoulder. They seem to hope I am Vincent Van Gogh reincarnated. If the painting is just begun or going poorly they heave a disappointed sigh and wander off in search of something more stimulating. If I am painting well they will hang out for a few minutes and are always very encouraging. A few times I have been on a roll with a piece and pray for someone to come along and share the fun. Then, of course, I am the only one for miles in any direction.

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June, 98

Due to demand from my gallerys I have had to educate myself in the limited edition print business. I didn't want to commit $600 for a three inch stack of prints of the same image even though, since I run a large traditional 2-color printing press I could get a discount. Instead I learned desktop publishing and quickly sold several 8x12 prints off my Hewlett Packard 722C in an 11"x14" frame for $80 each. My collectors were thrilled to be able to hang one of my images on their wall for a price that wouldn't break their budget. To my horror, I soon discovered inkjet prints are as fugitive as regular offset printing inks, fading noticeably in a week of direct sun on my testing apparatus (the dashboard of my '82 Toyota). The premium inkjet paper has an ink receptive plastic laminated to the paper. This plastic cracked and peeled like an old master oil painting. As with regular offset printing inks like those used in full color books and magazines, the yellow and red pigments are the first to go. This is why you will often see old faded bluish posters in store windows and on telephone poles. The black and blue pigments last for months.

I found a forum on the Internet about digital publishing and discovered the Alps 1300 desktop printer. I have tested this printer and in its NON dye-sub mode at 1200 dpi the pigments are quite a bit more fade-resistant. However, due to rapidly improving technology and declining prices I am, for now, using traditional enlargements from 35mm negatives done at Richcolorlab.com in Tacoma for my 8x12 prints. These are the kind of traditional chemical prints you get from your wedding photographer and are guaranteed for 64 years in sunlight. I've tested them in the Toyota and they are as good as the original pastel pigments after several months. Richcolor does offer prints on the same good paper using my digital files but I have not yet tried it. It would be handy to be able to tinker with the colors in Photoshop and stretch the images so they all fit the same frame dimensions.