Erasers, rubbers and scrapers

Using a razor blade to erase parts of an ink drawing on Bristol Board

I have devoted several posts to various drawing mediums and suggested that their medium specificity was something you need to explore if you need to think about the full range of expression available to you. However except for a brief mention of erasers in my post on the pencil , I haven't given much time or thought to the importance of erasure techniques. So perhaps its now time to address this.

Erasure is of course also a conceptual idea and just as there are a variety of technical ways to remove the marks made to construct a drawing, there are just as many theoretical implications as to why we might erase and what the activity itself might mean. In my post on The Magic Slate I highlighted the importance of Freud's essay A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad and explained that he reasoned that especially traumatic conscious thought could vanish into the unconscious, but that it would always survive in the mind in a similar way to the faint impressions inscribed in the wax. I. e. that erasure usually leaves signs of how it has been done and that as a drawing medium in its own right, it can also act as a metaphor for how we think.

As Freud pointed out, the act of erasure can be related to how our subconscious operates, therefore as I go through the various ways that you might technically erase something, don't forget that as you apply a new process of removal, you are also creating a new story or narrative of removal. Perhaps these narratives can be seen as ghost stories, I'm always more frightened by a trace of what might have been than by most direct confrontations with reality.

Trace of a human erased by an atomic bomb blast

In Hong Kong cleaners are employed to hastily remove graffiti by painting over it with bleach, washing it off with a high-pressure water gun, or by taping over the graffiti with sheets of black or white plastic. They are not skilled enough however, and they still leave traces of what was written, therefore they in effect highlight the attitude of the Chinese government to what the people of Hong Kong are saying, rather than erase what they were saying from history.

Typical drawing erasers are made of synthetic rubber, nylon, or other man-made materials, but before these carbon heavy and not very sustainable petrochemical manufactured erasers were invented, stale bread was often used for removing chalk marks from paper.

Rubber was called 'rubber' by the English chemist Joseph Priestley because of its effectiveness in “rubbing out” marks on paper, and it soon supplanted bread as a correction tool. However bread can still be used.

Bread prepared for use as an eraser

Partial erasure of graphite with bread

As a remover of dry art materials from paper surfaces bread isn't great, (see this pdf for a full analysis) but if you know this, bread can still be used to 'ghost out' sections of a graphite drawing. This ability, coupled with an understanding that stale bread was used, perhaps even retaining the breadcrumbs in some way, could well become central to an image's meaning. For instance Anthony Gormley in his 'Bread Works', such as 'Bed' 1980, involved a programme of erasure by eating, during which he ate his own volume in bread.

Anthony Gormley: Bed

Rubber erasers are soft and gentle on paper, and are often found on the top of pencils. They are typically pink in colour and are usually found in wedge shapes. The Faber pink pearl is probably the most well known of this variety and during manufacture it has pumice added into its rubber mix, thus giving it more abrasive power, whilst keeping the soft pliable nature of the rubber. The example below is of a double ended rubber or of course eraser if you are from the States. Notice it is latex free, a sign of the times, therefore made from synthetic rubber. The softer pencil erasing end is still pink and the harder ink eraser blue.

The Faber Castell ink and pencil eraser

I find this type of eraser OK but on charcoal not as effective as a kneaded one for ease of control. However kneaded erasers will not remove everything, so you need to get back to a pure white, use something harder, like the Pink Pearl. The Pink Pearl has pumice added into the rubber to ensure a better bite, which means that it is on the way to being an ink eraser. Sand ink erasers are often made out of rubber mixed with sand or silica, and these erasers are the toughest.

A sand eraser

Through the application of charcoal and chalk, and the extensive work to remove them, Auerbach creates an ebb and flow of creation, damage and repair, a cycle that reflects our everyday experience of being worn away by life's reality.

Frank Auerbach

The erasures in Auerbach'a drawings are as much about the creation of space, as the modelling of form, as much about the re-creation of a sitter's energy, as the establishing of planar direction. Touches of colour remind me of William Kentridge, another artist who has spent a lot of time erasing charcoal surfaces, but with a different intent. Kentridge uses erasure to establish and make a series of decisions, that could easily, as they sometimes do, become an animated series of consequences, whilst Auerbach is engaged with a philosophy of looking as opposed to a narrative about looking.

William Kentridge

For Auerbach to remove so much charcoal, I suspect he used a tough rubber eraser, whilst Kentridge may well have used a gum or kneaded eraser, because they can be stretched, compressed, split, and moulded for more precision erasing, pruning lines, cleaning edges, creating highlights through subtractive drawing, or performing other detailed work. They can completely remove light marks, but are ill-suited to fully erasing dark areas; notice the lack of deep tonal contrast in Kentridge's drawing. In fact, I suspect he often just used his fingers to wipe away charcoal, so that the ghost of the previous drawing activity is very clear. The other reason you might use a gum eraser, is that it leaves far less detritus on the drawing surface. A rubber eraser breaks down as it pulls the graphite, chalk or charcoal off the paper, so you get lots of crumbly bits on the surface, which you have to keep removing.

Notice this kneaded eraser is in various languages also a malleable gum eraser 

A gum or kneaded eraser can be stretched without breaking up

A gum eraser typically comes with a clear plastic cover

A putty eraser that crumbles if you try and pull it apart

These kneaded erasers or gum erasers are also sometimes called putty rubbers, often the same but not always. Try and tear one in half, if it tears more like bread, it wont stick back together again, so is not a kneaded eraser/gum eraser and will break up as you use it. The other aspect of a kneaded/gum/putty rubber is that instead of rubbing to remove a layer of charcoal or graphite or chalk, you can press the eraser down and then lift it up to remove a thin layer. Done subtly this can be used to make very delicate refinements. To clean these erasers you can simply stretch a clean part over the used dirty part, hiding the layer of removed dust inside your ever changing flexible ball of kneadable gum/putty.

Gum Eraser

The other eraser that gets confused with the kneaded eraser is what is sometimes called the “art gum” eraser. A gum eraser has a soft, gummy texture and can have a slightly translucent-looking appearance. They absorb graphite and crumble as they erase. The eraser itself is a little bit softer than a typical rubber eraser, so it is better suited to use on some soft, easily broken up paper surfaces. The thing to think about is that the kneadable eraser is malleable like chewing gum, while a gum eraser looks like a solid block of gum Arabic. 

Vinyl Erasers

Vinyl erasers are the hardest ones and can even erase ink marks. They feel smoother when erasing as they do not catch the paper so much as you work the eraser backwards and forwards. I often use Steadtler Mars Plastic erasers to remove underlying pencil drawings from images that have had watercolour built up over initial pencil marks. Their plastic 'crumbs' are finer than the ones that come off rubber erasers, so again you have less mess. However you do need to keep cleaning them by rubbing them over a clear paper surface, if not they can begin to smear dark marks back onto your drawing.  

My old friend Richard Baker used to use an electric eraser to refine his pencil drawings and found it a very powerful tool. It has a small tip, so it lends itself to detailed work. 

Richard Baker: Collection only; Graphite

Electric erasers

Electric erasers usually come with both 5mm and 2.5mm tips and these tips can be sharpened further with a piece of sandpaper if you need a really precise erasure.

Glass erasers were originally designed to remove ink from transparent papers, and they are actually made of' 'fibreglass'

Glass eraser

As well as for ink removal, they are often used for tarnish removal of battery terminals and getting rid of corroded solder when re-soldering. You can draw with them in a similar way to the use of an electric rubber, especially if you want fine white lines within a grey graphite texture. As rubbers they are good for working on a wide range of hard surfaces. 

Eraser shields. If you are looking for precision then you might look at using eraser shields. These are thin sheets, usually made of metal or plastic and designed with different shaped spaces. An erasing shield is a mask used to control the effects of an eraser, like a reverse stencil, instead of adding a new surface through a cut stencil, you remove one. The tool is made of a thin, flexible material such as transparent plastic, or stainless steel shim stock for durability and it is used for very precise work, so usually you will see them in an engineering drawing office. But like all tools they can be used by an artist in any way you want, for instance to create precise gaps within an image. This video shows how they are normally used.

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Using an eraser shield
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• Blackboard chalk can be erased using a blackboard eraser.
  
  

  

Blackboard erasers are made of laminated felt pads made mostly of nylon threads. They make a very distinctive erasure surface and are often used not just to erase an image or writing but as a symbol for an idea being erased. But remember a wet rag is sometimes better, again it is the quality of the mark on erasure that is important as well as the association you want to make with it. 

The textures of blackboard erasure.

Poster for a Cy Twombly exhibition using the idea of the blackboard and its erasure

The origin of the word erasure is radere, to scrape and scrapers and scraping are also important erasure processes and tools. 

Scraping into oil pastel 

Artists often draw with scrapers, and this is sometimes done by laying one colour down first and then going over it with black. On the other hand if you are working in ink on Bristol Board or a similar tough surface, a razor blade is an effective way of removing any dry ink you don't want before proceeding to re-ink the surface. (See image at the top of this post)

To scrape away an image can make it feel as if you are conducting some sort of speeded up erosion of a surface, but by cutting into the surface by changing the angle of the blade, suddenly it begins to feel as if you are plowing it up and then a little more angle and push and then you are digging into the surface. All these approaches can be further facilitated by laying gesso grounds of various thickness onto your papers before beginning to draw. See link below on drawing grounds.

Each form of erasure will come with its own associations and metaphorical possibilities, the issue being that the removal of your marks is as important as their initial application and it is one of the main ways that artists embed time into their images, because you can read each faintly visible erased mark, as a frozen moment of the past. 

Lucienne Rickard: extinction studies

Extinction studies is a series of drawings made by the artist Lucienne Rickard, whereby she erases each image of a species as soon as she has constructed it. The ghosts of previous drawings build up behind the image she is presently making, all reminders that the actual animals she is depicting are also gradually being erased from existence. 

Roy Eastland: Silverpoint on gesso

Roy Eastland often deals with fading memories and he will sometimes sand away his silverpoint drawing in order to emphasise the delicate nature of memory; his images emerging out of their gesso surface as if they are coming out of a morning mist. The drawing above is of an old toy, it dissolves back into our collective memories, just as easily as it emerges from them, Eastland is one of the few people who I think can work effectively from photographic imagery, his approach transcending the idea of copying and replacing it with a material memory, one that is able to embed the frailty of humanity into a reflection upon a mechanical process, at the heart of which is something to do with mark making and erasure. 

See also:

Drawing grounds
Asemic writing More thoughts on Hong Kong graffiti erasure
The pencil and sustainability
Pencils and erasers
Silverpoint drawing