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

Drawing textures

Physiography from Principles of Cartography by Erwin Raisz 1962


Texture is used to define surface difference. If you look at the textural patterns for various types of geographic landscapes as they might be rendered on a map above, you quickly get an idea of how we use texture to identify differences in physical nature or surface appearance. These differences are what we have become used to as indicators of the thingness or physical quality of objects. We are aware of metals being very different to textiles and that these are different to skin or bone. When we look at the recreation of 3D form in CGI there are three basic levels of 'realism'. The first is the wire frame construction, which I have looked at recently and which has emerged from 'cross contour' drawing practices, linked to technical drawing and perspective conventions. The second level of realism is usually the use of tone to describe form or shading. Phong shading tends to be the default in contemporary 3D computer graphics and it is a type of shading I objected to when I first became interested in 3D computer rendering, because I felt it tended to make everything look like plastic. The next level in terms of visual realism is texture mapping, usually applied alongside Phong or other types of shading software, a process that allows you to take a simple polygon and give it the appearance of something far more complex. The texture map's parametric textural information is tied to the individual polygons that form an object's surface, which means that if the surface moves or deforms the texture goes with it. This is a very convincing construct and is now the standard 'realistic' effect in CGI. You could argue it is today's equivalent of 'trompe-l'œil' painting; the English translation of which would be; “deceive the eye”, indeed its definition is 'the representation of an object with such verisimilitude as to deceive the viewer concerning the material reality of the object'. Therefore 'deception' is central to the textual mapping CGI effect. Plato warned people to be very wary of this state of affairs, he stated over 2,000 years ago that as art imitates physical things, creating in effect a copy of a copy, it leads us further and further away from truth and into a world of illusion.

CGI surface illusion

Another problematic issue in relation to these illusions is 'point of view'. In perspective everything works fine, so long as you are at the exact spot that the perspective is designed to be seen from. This issue was unpicked in detail by Panofsky, who highlighted the fact that perspective was not just a technical means to render space in a convincing way, but that it was a symbolic form. It reinforces a particular way of looking at the world, and I would argue makes the world 'commodifiable' by making objects and buildings appear graspable as things, a state totally at odds to an understanding of a world consisting of actions experienced as processes. 

A powerful illusion can be created of almost any form with a surface texture, in the case of the rooster above feathers and leather are convincingly rendered, making this fantasy cockerel appear to be very 'real'. 

We all know that fur feels soft, tree bark feels rough, and silk feels smooth, but also fur looks soft, tree bark looks rough, and silk looks smooth. This conjoined tactile/visual aspect of surface textural variation as Stephens & Hoffman (2016, p.257) pointed out, has long being used by artists and designers 'to evoke emotions and set moods'. Texture is therefore not just something that can create illusions of reality, it is essential to the development of forms that can stimulate emotion. 

Textures used by Stephens & Hoffman to test out aesthetic preference

It would seem in this case that touch and sight are again brought together in close proximity, our experience of textures being reinforced by a combination of perceptual stimuli. Synesthesia, the perceptual phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway, it has been argued, (Cytomic, 2002) leads to a much more heightened awareness of the perceived experience. 

Perception and feeling it would appear, are inextricably linked together. The qualia related to both experiences, I would argue reinforcing each other, because the qualia associated with emotional feeling developed as part of the interoception and associated body schema systems, would be generated at virtually the same time as the visual qualia entering the body from outside. These raw qualities of sensations, emotions and thoughts, although experienced privately, subjectively, and directly, are also what will eventually make up the building blocks from which all communication, both logical and emotive, will be effected. (Wolfe and Bell, 2007) A movement of chemical and electrical energy, is central to both perception and resultant action, the holistic nature of the process becoming more and more apparent as research into the processes associated with cognition advances. 

Computer generated textural surfaces developed from hand applied textures

In the image above certain aspects of body schemas have been used to both suggest the idea of the body as its own landscape, as well as being a place within which decisions are being made as to how the body 'thinks' and feels. Indeed it has been argued by Margaret Wilson, (2006, p. 211) that body schemas act as prediction devices, interacting with perception, cognition and behaviour in a variety of ways. These schemas can be thought of as copying devices and as such perhaps lie behind our interest in likeness or similarity as ways to develop meaning. In this way we return to metaphor as being integral to the development of our ideas. 

This close relationship between perception, illusion and emotional stimulus, was also something Plato commented on in relation to his worries about the power of art to effect people's emotional states, not only was illusion to be distrusted because it was not truthful, art's power to effect emotions, meant that for Plato illusion and emotional manipulation are often found together and this is something that we have seen to be more and more the case in this age of post truth politics, CGI and powerful media illusions. However as a process, the interrelationship between perception, illusion and emotional stimulus, would seem to be central to how we as humans devise ideas, so perhaps it is a problem deeply rooted in the very way we need to digest information. Copying, fiction and a tendency to find meaning in likeness all influencing our perceptual receptivity and responses to the world, so rather than like Plato trying to outlaw any art form that uses these tendencies, we should perhaps be seeking to observe how they operate and how we are prone to give effect and agency to perceptions that are as much inner constructions as they are responses to changing outer conditions. 

 

References

Cytowic, R.E., 2002. Synesthesia: A union of the senses. MIT press.

Panofsky, E., 2020. Perspective as symbolic form. Princeton University Press.

Stephens, K.D. and Hoffman, D.D., 2016. On Visual Texture Preference: Can an Ecological Model Explain Why People Like Some Textures More Than Others?. Perception, 45(5), pp.527-551.

Wilson, M (2006) Covert Imitation: How body schema acts as a prediction device in Knoblich, Thornton, Grosjean and Shiffrar (2006) Human Body Perception from the Inside out Oxford: Oxford University press

Wolfe, C.D. and Bell, M.A., 2007. The integration of cognition and emotion during infancy and early childhood: Regulatory processes associated with the development of working memory. Brain and Cognition, 65(1), pp.3-13.

Useful resource on texture mapping

See also:

Drawing texture Part two

Texture: between drawing and sculpture

Drawing and perception: the curved surface

Surface and inner body perception in an age of CGI

Qualia

Cross contour drawing

Making your own drawing tools for texture

Collage part four: Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford's Venice Biennale USA pavilion

Mark Bradford's collages at first sight don't look like collages. The elements he collects from the streets around him are fused into huge shapes that can feel more animal like than a collaged collection of bits of paper and other street found materials. By welding together disparate elements with a rubberised solution and then sanding down the surface, the urban environment is sunk down into his abstract compositions and becomes the sinews of his work. The necessary tensions that are set up between the desire for compositional simplicity and using a process that is able to hold together masses of complicated stuff, creates a level of cognitive dissonance; his work has been described as having 'informal formalism, raw elegance and intricate boldness' as both emotional and restrained. The many layers and fragments of his collage, its patterns and dislocations, produces a practice that reflects the complex experience of city life, in many ways the built-up layers of materials also seem to echo the way the evolution of a city is reflected in its final shape. These images are exquisitely detailed, and have very distinctive shapes and patterns, compositions that have been described as like the aerial view of a city at night.

Mark Bradford in front of his work

Bradford’s huge collages are often compared to Modernist abstract painting. Yet his is an abstraction that comes more from the urban sprawl of his native Los Angeles than from art history: As Mark Bradford has stated, ‘There is an abstraction that happens in the city... a dislocation of reality when you have the Mexican taqueria next to the black wig shop across the street from the Korean nail shop’.

Los Moscos

Bradford's huge collage Los Moscos (2006) explores the structures of a city, its histories, cultures and economic systems. (The title translates as ‘the flies’, a derogatory term applied to migrant labourers in the San Francisco Bay area.) Composed from the signage of South Central LA, an area colonised by the entertainment industry, the work consists of hundreds of fragments of torn printed paper – posters, flyers, packaging – found by the artist in the streets surrounding his studio. Words and phrases appear and disappear throughout the picture surface, they emerge in a way analogous to the textural change as you walk through the area, the embedded materials that are revealed by sanding back the layers, capture the area’s cultural and historical multiplicity. 

Remnants of found posters and billboards, graffitied stencils and logos, and hairdresser’s permanent endpapers he’s collected from his other profession as a stylist, are all embedded into his dense surfaces. In this way personal history is intertwined with the on-going cultural interchange of commerce and social interaction. An old post-it note from an office computer screen, finding itself butted up against the remains of an AIDS awareness poster, that is itself sandwiched between a torn left over political slogan and a poster advert for the latest Mercedes car.

The devil is beating his wife

In 'The Devil is Beating His Wife', Bradford consolidates all these materials into a gridded composition of cultural cross-referencing. Built up on plywood, his 'painterly' collages can also be appreciated for their sensuous qualities, which can range from silky and skin-like to oily and singed.

Bradford uses a process of machine-sanding layers of street posters to make his abstract surfaces. However looking more closely at these surfaces made me think that he is also either rubbing into them bitumen or linseed oil, or changing the materials he is using to cement the layers together, so that as he sands down his collaged pieces alternative textual surfaces are revealed. When you walk up to these surfaces of Bradford's images, various secondary patterns come into view. The process of sanding through layers or peeling them off can reveal order in the chaos of collected street detritus. Sometimes these surfaces can look cellular and at other times they look as if they are star systems ripped out of a rubbish tip. He states: “I go between the micro and the macro, where the macro is policy change the micro is the local level. I go between helping one person and trying to change the policy.” The patterns of his images, echoing the patterns of his exchanges in his local community.

But he doesn't just make large abstract images. He is expanding his practice into a social direction by working with foster children and other at-risk communities. Two weeks before his Venice Biennial official opening, Bradford helped launch a new pop-up retail center in Venice stocked with handiwork by local female prisoners and a limited-edition bag he designed. He funded the pop-up, all proceeds from which go to Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a non-profit organisation that employs incarcerated women. “I don’t know if we’ve seen someone with the dexterity of De Kooning who is also committed to activism,” Christopher Bedford, co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion, told the LA Times, when the U.S. State Department announced that Bradford would represent the country. “That is unique to art,” he continued, echoing a widely-held artworld assumption that abstractionists are typically not socially conscientious.

Mark Bradford

Speak Birdman

The image 'Speak Birdman' is map-like in its structure, the 'Bird-man' in the title hovering over the city and seeing it as a vibrant map of pulsating life. The surfaces of images like these are wonderful to explore as you get close to them. I'm never sure as to how they are made, but they do suggest that he builds his collages up into a very thick initial layer, which is then I suspect 'filled' with some sort of grouting or filler, something that will harden as well as stick all the layers together; but what that is I'm not sure, you would have to do lots of testing to find out, but that in itself might lead to some interesting new surface possibilities. Once solid and dry he must use everything from an industrial sander to hand scrapers and simply pulling off layers with his hands to shape the surface and it's these processes that make the work so beautiful, so unexpected and which ties his work into a history of modernism. Modernism's concerns with surface and flatness are both embedded into the conceptual framework within which his work is theorised. Warhol's work was able to theorised as being both flat and about images. Warhol's work was 'painted' using silkscreen print processes and therefore all painterly gestures were rendered flat, his images were not illustrational because they were actual physical manifestations of photographic processes. Bradford's collages contain the 'matter' from which the city is made and therefore he is both able to represent a type of abstraction, one that is very flat, (but thick) and represent the all over compositional devices of artists like Jackson Pollock. He is able to hold within the work real content about the city, the collage elements and advance the cause of Modernism by demonstrating how colour and surface can be yet again re-energised and another formal game added to the Modernist project. Perhaps above all he has been able to restore an idea of the beautiful to the cannon of contemporary art. 

 Mark Bradford video 1


 Mark Bradford video 2

Mark Bradford video 3

Mark Bradford talks about his use of paper about halfway through this video

Collage: Part one


Collage: part two

Collage: part three

Collage part five

Articulated collage

Drawing on transparent drafting film

Jasper Johns: Ink on Plastic

When I went to the Jasper Johns exhibition at the Royal Academy the other week I was reminded of how pleasurable it is to draw on drafting film. I often use 'Truegrain' for doing this, which I buy in rolls. 'Truegrain' is a textured polyester drafting film, that I first used when I was teaching printmaking. It is a wonderful surface to draw on if you want to make a photo-exposure for a silkscreen. The grain of the surface and its high level of transparency mean that you can get a wide range of textural effects using charcoal, litho crayon, graphite, acrylic, pen & ink, gouache, oil pastel and other drawing and painting materials. In particular the grain allows you to get 'drag' on your brushstrokes and more 'pull' or 'lift' off a litho or similar crayon. Without the grain the marks are too smooth, less responsive. 
You can of course also use it to make drawings on,  just think of it another surface to respond to. However it comes into its own when you have some form of light coming through from the back. Jasper Johns simply uses very white paper behind his ink drawings on plastic film, this being enough to reveal the rich textual possibilities. 

Jasper Johns: 'Regrets' ink on plastic

If you look closely at the image above you can see the way that dilute ink coagulates and has a tendency to thicken and thin in unpredictable ways, thus keeping the surface active and ensuring that what could become 'empty' shapes always have a textual energy about them. 
Of course you can also use these transparent sheets of plastic to trace images through and Johns has availed himself of this possibility with his tracings of Cezanne's 'Bathers'. 

Jasper Johns: Tracing of Cezanne

The use of brown ink is suggestive of a historical mode and once again the ink's tendency to clot and blob has been used to help transform what could easily have been an uneventful tracing into an image that now sits easily within Johns' concern with the status of the surface and its problematic relationship with the image. 

The artist Hadi Tabatabai has used acrylic polyester sheets in a totally different way, relying on the thickness of the sheets to give a sense of depth to his very tightly controlled non figurative constructions. 

Hadi Tabatabai

By drawing on both the back and front of a sheet of acrylic film, Tabatabai can construct a both in and out of focus perception of the image, our eyes therefore begin to attempt to refocus on what our brain has decided is a layer either closer or further away. This activates the space in a totally different way to Jasper Johns' surface treatment. 

Jim Dine: Charcoal on mylar transparent sheet

Jim Dine had a rich drawing centred practice and at one time he focused directly on making what he called heliogravure prints, which were made directly from drawings made on different transparent surfaces. He used three different categories of supports: clear plastic sheets, frosted plastic sheets, and translucent paper. The Morgan Museum has a very good account of this and their blog post on Dine includes some excellent close-ups of his techniques here. Dine would scratch into the surface, fix the bits of rubbed out charcoal onto the surface with acrylic spray,  wipe surfaces down with cloths etc. Anything to get the required effect. 
Because these transparent surfaces have a direct association with printmaking, working on them can be a very good way of bridging the gap between the two disciplines. There is a very large light box at the back of the drawing studio and it is often underused, why not get some polyester film and just work up some of your drawings onto it, and then take the most interesting ones along to the print room and see how they translate into silkscreen prints. 

The black lines drawn on the image above are where Dine wanted the edges of the resulting print to be. At the time Dine was drawing from Greek and Roman antiquities in The Glyptothek in Munich, and I have mentioned before how useful this can be.  

You can find out more about 'Truegrain' here It is about £16 a sheet, which might seem expensive, but when compared to canvas and the need to make stretchers it might not seem too bad. 

See also:

Monoprinting
Monoprints and lithographs
Drawing and printmaking More on Jasper Johns
More on Jim Dine
SKETCH

More thoughts about papers

Stained glass

Why does ink stick to paper?

I often use water-based ink on paper as my drawing material. I sometimes categorise my drawing materials into those that flow in water as if in a primordial sea and those that are scraped off on hard surfaces like some form of geological attrition. There is for myself a rightness about the flow of ink, it feels as if I am tapped into working with something akin to my own life blood.

But in order to explain this I need to explore some very basic things about drawing with water based inks, to look at the underlying processes that allow drawings to ‘stick’ to the paper they are made on.

I usually choose to use water based or hydrophilic inks, which are in chemical terms called polar inks, i.e. their molecules have a high attraction for certain papers, that causes them to absorb and/or be receptive to water.

I use paper that is made of cellulose fibres, and cellulose is a polymer of the simple sugar, glucose.

The key point about cellulose is that the polymer chains that bind cellulose together have -OH or hydroxyl groups sticking out all around them; they look as if they are wanting to bond with something. Hydroxyl groups are often found in organic or ‘life’ chemistry and are vital to the formation of sugars and alcohols. A hydroxyl group consists of one hydrogen and one oxygen atom, which is of course closely related to the structure of water, which consists of two hydrogen atoms bonded with one oxygen atom. Hydroxyl groups are polar, and the oxygen side is always negative, while the hydrogen side is always positive. All a hydroxyl molecule needs to become a water molecule is another hydrogen molecule, therefore it has a high capacity to form a hydrogen bond. The capacity of a hydroxy group to form hydrogen bonds imparts water solubility and internal structural stability to proteins, including amino acids and hydroxy groups also participate in the dehydration reactions that link simple biological molecules into long chains. I.e. they allow some of the fundamental life processes to be maintained.

So when my inks do attach happily to their paper surface, they will attach initially using a hydrogen bond, which is “the electrostatic attraction between two polar groups that occurs when a hydrogen (H) atom covalently bound to a highly electronegative atom such as oxygen (O) experiences the electrostatic field of another highly electronegative atom nearby.”

As I use my water based or hydrophilic inks, they will create molecular bonds within the thin layer of water that I have created around the cellulose fibres as I drag my ink laden pen or brush across the surface of the paper. Put into very basic terms, my water based ink sticks to paper because it has a high affinity for the medium it's being applied to.

On the other hand there are hydrophobic surfaces. When water based ink is drawn onto a surface that it doesn't like, it aggregates, it sort of clumps together, as if it is trying to avoid any interaction with the surface. Just rub some butter or lard on a sheet of paper and try and draw on it, you will see what I mean.

This is not about repulsion between individual water molecules and lipids, it is because of the strong attraction of water molecules for one another in comparison with the slight lipid attraction.

When water soluble ink begins to interact with lipids, (organic compounds that are insoluble in water, such as fatty acids or grease), the water forms ordered cages around the hydrophobic elements, (the lipids), because of the way the water molecules are more attracted to each other than the lipids. These cages cause a decrease in entropy, and by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, this is unfavourable. I.e. the system cannot pass from one stage of thermodynamic equilibrium to another, therefore the internal structural stability that hydroxyl groups give to proteins, would not be possible.

In the diagram above you can think of the ink as the water, and the hydrocarbon chain of the lipid as the greasy surface.

For me this is a deep metaphor, the difficulty of trying to draw with water based inks on a greasy surface, is reflected in the fact that the molecules cannot interact positively and the ease in which my ink flows and bonds with paper, reflects the way that water operates as a life enhancing medium, the complex molecular bonds that are needed to create amino acids being not that dissimilar to the way that ink sticks to paper via intermolecular attraction.

The fact that I can think of my ink as being like blood is not too far fetched, in fact T S Elliot stated that the purpose of literature was to turn blood into ink. An ink very like blood in appearance is oak or iron gall ink. Iron gall ink is a purple-black or brown-black ink made from iron salts and vegetable sourced tannic acids (usually oak galls), and was the standard drawing ink used in Europe from the 5th century to the 19th century, remaining in use well into the 20th century. 

The ink stuck so well because iron sulphate, (FeSO₄) added to tannic acid (C_6H2(OH₃COOH) had a very strong affinity with the cellulose fibres of vellum and paper. In fact the bond was so strong the only way to erase a mark was to sand the whole surface down.

The other area of intermolecular attraction that is also helping to hold the ink on paper, (London forces), also operates as one of the main forces when holding marks on paper when drawing with chalks, charcoal and graphite, so I will look at this in a future post, when I will try and open out some of the more geological aspects to leaving a mark on paper.  

There is also capillary action to consider. If you pour mercury over your paper it will not wet it, mercury's surface tension is so great it adheres to itself. But if you pour water onto paper it will wet it, even if the paper is sized, because the surface tension of water is much less. If however you clean the surface of a metal, such as aluminium, mercury will 'wet' that. 

At a level below all this is the behaviour of sub-atomic forces and the fact that these are shaping everything we do is sometimes forgotten. If you want to explore these in more detail go to my posts of drawing and quantum theory. 

Drawing and quantum theory one
Drawing and quantum theory two

I did refer to London Forces briefly at the end of an earlier post and you can find that here.

See also:

For more on oak gall ink

For thoughts on hard dry drawing materials

Chinese ink drawing

Drawing in pen and ink

Drawing using pigments suspended in water