Help! How to Protect Artwork from Smudging?

Take a photo of it and frame it. Even fixatives will have a hard time making it stick.
J.
Artist and photographer

Go to Micheal's art store & get the fixative spray can that protects art.

This acrylic fixative is as clear as water, extremely lightfast, resistant to aging and non-matte. Excellent for fixing works done with pastel, pencil, charcoal, wax crayon, india ink, tempera and watercolor. Use it as a final varnish for acrylics and oils. Nothing beats Lascaux for sealing photographs, photostats, art prints, lithographs, proofs and gold leaf. Lascaux Fixative seals without aging and forms a lightfast, invisible scratchproof seal. Contains no fluorocarbons.

Any spray you use will probably peel off eventually. The waxy coating on the box is non-porous so most likely nothing will stick. Just take a picture of the artwork and print it out if it is that wonderful :)

You might want to see if you can get it laminated at Staples or Office Depot. Or, you can purchase self-laminating kits from either store. If that doesn't work, you might want to take a picture of it for your son's and your own scrapbooks. I do that with some of my children's artwork. Other pieces, I get matted and framed from AC Moore or Michaels, both of which this week are offering 50% specials on framing with a coupon.

I don't know of any 'home remedy' but when I studied art in college, there was a fixative spray that would keep chalk and pastels from smudging. Perhaps check with a local craft store like MICHAELS to see if there is something that would keep precious masterpieces in tact.
It will be worth the investment of a few bucks to have that creativity around for a long time. ;-)
S.

Try spraying the artwork with a matte or glossy finish, which you can find in craft stores. Just remember to test it out on a sample of the markers on something else, to see if the spray makes the marker run.

spray it with hairspray.

when ever you do pastell or charcol drawings they affix it with hiar spray.

Try www.ShareMyKidsArt.com - I love this website! It's free and lets you store and organize your children's art. The thing I like it about the most is it has these little buttons so that you can email or upload to your facebook wall pieces of art; this is really nice for us because we live in California and my parents live in Hawaii and my wife's parents live in NY. If one of our children create something we want to share with the grandparents, we simple press a button.

The only thing is you need to scan or photograph the art, which seems like a hassle but it's actually fairly easy. Good luck!

take a picture of it. you can try putting contact paper over it but i think you might mess it up while putting it on.

Tape! The wide clear kind works, just be careful not to overlap the edges or you'll be able to tell that it is on there.

In art class when I was a kid, they used clear Krylon spray.

I'm not sure if this would work, but I offer it in case. What about putting a sheet of clear contact paper over it? You can cut it to size and simply press into place. Good luck!