As a now long-term committed artist, I’ve always looked for new ways to improve my style and methods and find myself constantly getting better and better with my craft. Many artists will tell you that their favorite tool is their eraser, which kinda speaks for itself upon further inspection.
When pursuing a traditional piece of hand-drawn art, the eraser allows you to
- clear a jumbled up mess on your piece
- patch up a mistake and restart
- try a different perspective until it works
just to name a few conveniences. Despite these positives however, a typical eraser comes with a good number of negatives that will leave an artist wanting to ease up their craft.
These faults mainly include
- smudges dirtying the eraser
- leaving streaks on the piece
- gripping the piece possibly causing tears and creases.
This brings me to the product I am shedding light on, the kneaded eraser. I bought my kneaded eraser roughly one year ago as required by numerous art classes I was starting. The kneaded eraser is a block of unvulcanized rubber that can be stretched and molded, to which you then rub it over the desired spot of graphite. In using the it more frequently after acquiring it, I discovered this eraser functions far more efficiently and as desired. Like a traditional eraser, the kneaded eraser meets all of the positives I had mentioned above. But in contrast, it disregards the negatives I had previously mentioned when used properly. When drawing, I like to stretch and mold my kneaded eraser into a roll and roll it across the page until the image fades to my liking. One of my favorite aspects of this eraser is that instead of outright erasing graphite, it slowly dissipates your drawing the more you apply it to the page. This is convenient for me since I like to draw comic book characters, part of that process is initially marking out the figure with sticks and shapes, then overlaying that with the actual character. I used to find it challenging leaving reminents of the marker figure when drawing characters with traditional erasers since they either couldn’t leave the desired faint image or they would outright ruin the page with streaks and unwanted marks.
If you the reader are an aspiring traditional artist, I highly recommend the kneaded eraser as an essential tool since it has helped me tremendously in my experience.
