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I guess it depends on what was used for the paintings. Acrylic paint basically turns into plastic once dried, so that should last a while. Oils are obviously more problematic, although it's not like these are renaissance paintings from a few hundred years ago. The painting surface can be the weak spot though... canvas, cardboard or MDF usually aren't water proof unless sealed. But as I understand it, the Lucas archive is a professionally cared for, temperature-controlled facility, so most stuff should be safe. As a matter of fact, Craig Derrick told me he's planning a trip to the archives soon. I asked him to especially look for boxart - originals and slides/transparencies - to at least make sure these are properly stored and modern scans could be made. I doubt that he's in a position to share anything for the poster project, but it would at least ease my mind a bit if these works can be confirmed to be safe. As for the quality of slides: Just look at the quality of the new MI poster. That one was most definitely created from a slide. The detail is very good, but as I mentioned above, there's still room for improvement. But that would require going back to the original painting, because all those shortcomings are now baked into those slides.

It could be cool to have a raw or unedited version for studying purposes, the details in the brush strokes are really cool to see . Paintings even on paper don't deteriorate too much if they are handled mildly responsibly, that means not trowing them to gather dust and humidity in an open space. The more delicate pieces are the ones made with markers though, if they are not covered from light sources (specially the sun) the colors fade away really fast. Watercolors and acrylic paints can be displayed without problems other than having the paper yellowing (direct sun light without UV filters can yellow the paper, also depends on the paper quality too), gouaches can be displayed too but a drop of water can do a bit of damage if it's not sealed or covered. Oils don't have much of a problem, usually the varnish is the one that gets really yellow and dark and it can be removed and replaced, but I think modern varnishes have less yellowing problems. *On a side note, I was looking for a better version of the Edison's portrait but couldn't find one, I only found a photo posted by Purcell a few years ago, I'm guessing this one was never made public, right? So I took the photo and cleaned it up the best I could and turned out to have really nice colors and details I didn't know it had, it's a shame it looks a bit blurry though, we might need to send a ninja to take photos wherever the original painting is haha!.

Love this, thank you Laserschwert and Jake. What a time to be alive!

I took a grab of the existing version for comparison: New scan: Let me know if I've messed up and this is unrepresentative somehow, Laser. But wow, even with any shortcomings of the scan/photo/repro techniques used, still a huge amount of extra detail!