Best Erasers for Dry Media - EXPLAINED

So I want to talk about erasers. So erasers, we got... Okay, so these are the three main eraser kinds, holding them clumsily to the camera. We have the shammy, which is this thing that looks like a cloth but is actually leather. We have the kneadable eraser, which is this soft, uh, plastiline play-doh thing. And then we have the hard eraser, which is basically very similar to the eraser that we all use as kids in school, only this one is kind of fancy and is in a grip. So they each have their pros and cons, and now we're going to talk about them. Shammy is the quickest, most effective eraser for the starting stages of a drawing, because it just erases really easily, uh, with one swipe. You don't have to, like, rub your hand against the paper an endless amount of time to remove something. You just one, one swipe of this thing and it's off. So this, this eraser is, is extremely useful for charcoal, mostly. So if you're working with charcoal, you definitely need to get yourself a shammy. And it's also fairly effective when it comes to different kinds of pastels. It does not work for graphite. So if you're excited to incorporate shammy erasing methods into your graphite practice, I'm sorry to disappoint, that doesn't work. I personally separate my shammy, the shammy that I use for color and the shammy that I use for charcoal. I wouldn't use the same shammy for both charcoal and, uh, pastels. Now the most important eraser, pardon the interruption, hope you're enjoying this video. And if you are, please take a moment to like, and to subscribe to my channel. Make sure you don't miss any of my upcoming cool stuff. And if you want to support my mission of making art education affordable and accessible, please consider joining my Patreon through the link in the description below. You'll have access to live lessons, all recorded workshops, Q&As, and much, much more. And you can sign up today for as little as two dollars. Thanks in advance for the support. Now back to the action. Is this one the kneadable eraser? It's the best and it works for all dry media. It's so useful because, as you can see, you can sculpt it into pretty much any shape, right? So if you really need some fine detail erasing, you can mold it into a tip and then just tick, tick, tick, you know, get all those tiny little light areas out there. If you're trying to do the highlight on the eye, right, you would just sculpt this to a point and tip. And then if you're trying to, let's say, create a feathery transition between a light area and a dark area, I would create a shape that looks like this, right, like a broom. And I would feather my paper like this, just move along across the paper. With this thing, it's like a fan, right? So this is so useful because you can create such delicate effects and such delicate transitions. This really is the secret to edges in dry media, right? Every time you're trying to do like a soft transition, it's usually the kneadable eraser that's going to deliver the most effective visual effects. So super awesome. Get better at using this. It's really productive. And then my pro tip for using the kneadable eraser is the more you use it, the more it gets kind of like old and hard, right, stiff, which some artists would say, oh, that's the point at which you need to throw them away because they don't erase as well. But I disagree. I think it's a brilliant thing to have erasers that erase very strongly, like the new ones, and then erasers that barely erase, which are the old ones. And they're both extremely useful because sometimes you just want to remove a little bit of powder. You don't want to just erase completely. So I would definitely reach for an old eraser at that point. So I almost have like gradations of, you know, extremely like these erasers that are saturated with a ton of powder, which are useful for very delicate erasing work. And then those ones that are almost brand new, which give more of a punchy erasing technique. And again, I find both of them really useful. The ones that are old are also stiffer, which allows them to maintain the shape better than the new ones. So I never throw away a kneadable eraser. And if a kneadable eraser gets so old that it doesn't erase anymore, I usually just incorporate it into another kneadable and create another variety. So there's another third one. So, oh, this one is kind of like a 911 kind of eraser. It's just sometimes you've drawn something and you want to remove it and the other two erasers don't work, then this eraser can come in for the rescue and deliver a more aggressive eraser action that could get rid of marks that the other erasers could not. And additionally, I find that this eraser is very, very useful for producing a sharp edge. Sometimes you have, on rare occasions, like a really light area right up against a really dark area with a very sharp area in the middle. Like, let's say you're drawing a pyramid or something, and then it's like the light plane immediately changes to the dark plane with a very, very crisp line in between. This eraser is going to do a better job than this eraser at articulating that very stark contrast and sharp edge.