 Welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok and I make mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you might want to just click out of this video right now because this is all about erasing, especially in art. Bob Ross told us there are no such things as mistakes in art, only happy accidents. But sometimes you can't just put a bird on top of certain accidents and you do need to erase it. Get it need to erase it. So I'm gonna be talking about needed erasers in particular in this video, not only for mistakes but to create really interesting effects in your artwork. I'm gonna start with the history of erasers and what did people use before we had these things in our hands to fix stray marks on our page? Then we're gonna talk about some tips to fix an overly sticky or overly dry eraser and then we're gonna compare some brands of needed erasers because I've been a Prismacolor girl my whole life. I have no idea if I'm missing out on something with another brand, so I'm gonna test out a bunch and then if we have a winner from that competition, I will employ it in a victory lap in drawing a Harry Potter portrait. Because it's Harry Potter Day. Use this guide to jump to any portion of this video that you find particularly interesting and otherwise kick back, relax, and let's talk about erasers. Did you know that before erasers were invented humans used bread to erase with? They used moist, de-crusted bread, so just the white part, squished it all up and used it as an eraser. Now you can imagine there were some problems with it. It would get moldy pretty quickly, it would crumble and dry and fall apart, but they didn't have anything else, so that's what they used. It wasn't until 1770 when English engineer Edward Nairn accidentally picked up a piece of rubber instead of a piece of squishy moist bread, but he discovered the rubber worked to erase graphite. Surprise, surprise, how do you accidentally pick up rubber instead of bread? I have no idea, but nonetheless that's how the story goes. Even though a piece of rubber did work as an eraser, it didn't work all that much better than a piece of squished up bread because it smelled bad, it was sensitive to weather conditions, and it fell apart pretty quickly, just like the bread did. But in 1839, Charles Goodyear invented a way to vulcanize the rubber, which made it last longer and it was available for use in all kinds of household products. It became durable enough to be used for all kinds of things like rubber erasers. The word rubber actually comes from the erasing properties of the product itself. Needed erasers are made from a synthetic gray or white, unvulcanized rubber and a non-drying oil, which makes them pliable and sticky and fun to play with. The way they work is that this is more attractive to the pigment particles that have been added to the paper than the paper is itself. It's a flexible, gummy material that erases graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, pastel, chalk, but it also can blur edges and give you a really interesting highlight through subtractive drawing. It can prune lines down, lift color so that you'll have a light shade of whatever it is left underneath. Lots of things that we're going to talk about in this video. If you buy an eraser that's just too sticky, and by that I mean you try to press it on the paper and like a whole bunch of the eraser just stays behind, then try kneading it for a while. Give it a good 10, 15 minutes of just playing with it while you're watching TV. And that should in general work, but if it doesn't, then pop it into the refrigerator and leave it there overnight and try it again in the morning and see if you can get it to work properly. If you have one that's way too dry and it just doesn't pull and stretch the way that this one is doing, because that's what it should do, then you can play with it for quite a while, see if you can warm it up in your hand, but you can also try using a hair dryer on it. Don't get it too close, you don't want to melt it, but sometimes that will help to just get it started and break up some of those particles so it becomes pliable again. However, at some point every needed eraser is going to reach its end of life. It's going to look like a piece of black chewing gum and it's going to be hard and not very pliable. This one has been in my life drawing group with me for quite a few months now and it's just full of a charcoal and it actually puts down more color than it lifts. So it's time to say Sayonara. Let's begin the needed eraser wars by meeting our contestants. And this is not an exhaustive list of everyone who makes them. There's lots of needed erasers out there, but I'll try these. Generals, I like some of their supplies and I thought I have some optimism there. Prismacolor I've used since college. Faber Castell, I don't think I've ever used their needed erasers because I don't recall them being in a little plastic case. Marie's is an off brand I think I got in a kit of some kind. And then we have the Caron Dash, which I have a lot of hope in because I love, love, love their high end art supplies. So I'm going to begin each one with the squish test, which is basically opening it and seeing what it's like right out of the package. Now guaranteed quality control, you may not get the same results in every package you purchase. There are also some that will change over time. Prismacolor has changed over time. But they have always been this difficult to open. I've always needed a knife to get it started. And when I open this one, it did stretch and squish a good bit, not as perfectly as I remember from back in the day. And I have some Prismacolor erasers I've had for just ages and ages and ages. But each one of these erasers, I thought I'm going to do an apples to apples and I'm going to squish it 10 times, you know, squish, pull, tug, whatever, 10 motions to see what happens. Second is Karen Dash, the one I have lots of hope for. The packaging came off much more easily. But it was a lot harder to squish and pull it didn't stretch as much. Doesn't mean anything in terms of how well it will perform in the test, but it was not as squishy as the Prismacolor didn't stretch. It also had a little bit of crumbly going on. Then our favorite castells that come in a nice case. You can keep them in the case, I think. So that's going to be a good thing. Keep it from sticking to your other art supplies. Plastic came off great and oh my goodness, the experience of stretching is what I recall from back in the day when I used to buy Prismacolor erasers when I was in college. This is such a nice feeling, just the way they pull and stretch. And I just liked it. I really liked it right out of the gate. And I did decide to try one of the colored ones. I have not experienced the colored ones before. Of course, had to try the yellow. And the packages the same, the plastic comes off just as easily. And the whole experience with a colored eraser is the same. I have no idea if they do anything different. Maybe it's so art students can keep their supplies separate from someone else's so they know which eraser is theirs. But I'm going to make a wild guess just from gut instinct that it's going to get dirty and be unsatisfying. I included Marie's in this test just because I had one here. But literally I never would have bought something that had all Chinese writing on it. So I'm not sure how it ended up here in the studio, but I figured let's give it the old test anyway and see the plastic was a little difficult to get off but not terrible. And then the squish test and like immediately it was shiny on the outside and it felt kind of weird. It was really hard to stretch and pull. So I was pretty sure that this was just a cheapo knockoff thing. So anytime something is super cheap, or you get it for free in a kit, beware, it also had some crumbly is falling off of it right away. And even 10 polls did not get it to function very well. Next up is generals. Again, I have a number of different supplies by them and they've been good quality. So optimism here pulling off the plastic was not nearly as painful as Prismacolor Prismacolor lost that test right out the gate. But the squishiness here again, not as pulley as I would kind of like it did get going eventually. And I do like the size of it. It's a nice big eraser and the bigger it is the longer to last just because when you have a needed eraser, when it gets all full of lead, all the erasers that you've made eventually you need to toss it. This one would last longer, but I didn't really get it to form into something nice in those 10 polls. It was still a little bit icky. I did give all the troubled erasers a little more needing in order to get them ready for this next test because I didn't want them to not pass it just because I was limiting everybody to 10. The pencil I'll be testing with is my trusty lead holder. I've had this thing since college, and I actually have three of them. I keep them with different leads in them. This one is a 6B and you buy them in these packages. They're nice thick leads, which I really do like. They're not like little mechanical pencils that have a very small thin lead and the lead just fits in there. Press the button and you can release the tip of it. It comes slightly sharpened, but you will need a sharpener. This one is one that's available on the market now. The one I have from college days that still works great is no longer sold anywhere. You could find one on eBay, but yeah. They work the same though. They have a thing inside. I'm guessing it's some kind of a sharpening stone or sharpening something that the pencil rubs along and you can see you can get a very, very sharp point on it. For the first test, I wanted to just see about basic lifting and I do a lot of lifting when I'm painting in watercolor. I'll sketch something out and then lift up the pencil off the surface. I just want to remove the excess graphite so that the line lightens. The way you do that is just to flatten the eraser and lay it on top and then press it. You'll press different amounts of pressure based on how strong the line is and how much you want to lift it up. I'm trying to do these at relatively equal testing pressures just so we have apples to apples, but things went a little awry. With each one of them, if they didn't get as flat as the Faber Castells at the top, they lifted a little bit unevenly just because they're not a super flat surface. And as I said, I did a little extra kneading for these, but not a ton. And they did things uneven. Marie's even pulled some of the paper surface up when doing this. Not a good start, Marie's. Don't do that to my paper. The Prismacolor worked okay, but again, I wasn't able to get it super flat because it's not a soft enough eraser. I've had Prismacolors that have been soft enough in the past, very disappointed that they did not do all that well here on this flattening test. And then the generals, which is the largest of the erasers, I didn't press it quite flat enough. So I ended up with a little extra on that tip that needed to be erased, but it performed well otherwise. Next up is going to be lifting off of some pencil that's been applied to the paper. And I'm not using heavy pressure here. I just wanted to give them a good go at first just to see what happened. Trying to put an equal amount roughly on each one of these so that I can test them and see how they perform. Squishing them into a bit of a point. I mean, the wonderful thing about kneaded erasers is the squishability. And you can make them into any size point that your little fingers can carve out of them. And that erased absolutely beautifully off the paper. The paper I'm using is a hot press Arches watercolor paper. So you may find different results on different papers. So test the ones that you have, especially when it comes to lifting off the surface. This has a really soft surface, which might be why Marie's had a little problem and got stuck pulled things off the top of the paper. And each one of these I decided I wasn't going to just try for one pull of the eraser because this test would never be over if I did that because they'd have to keep starting over because I'm terrible at this head to head testing stuff. So I gave them each a few swipes and everybody did just great. Even if you were a terrible eraser, you work well on doing something as simple as that. Next up I created some powdered pigment. And I've done this a lot with colored pencil. You can also do it here with graphite. And I'm using a tea strainer. I've linked the tea strainer in the supplies down below that I use. I got it at my grocery store. They're really cheap. You can get all kinds of tea strainers. You just want something with a very fine mesh so that it grates the pigment into powder. And then press it in with something. And I, to make a cloud, I'll just use a cotton ball. Very, very simple. You can use q-tips. You can use a blending stomp. You can blend it in a lot of different ways. But this is what I'm doing for this test to really press it into the paper and see how these erasers perform lifting off of something that's been really pressed into the paper as opposed to the lighter pressure that I used when scribbling with the pencil. And then I tried to make each one into a sharp point so I could make dots on them. And we were all going well just fine until we got to Marie's and I couldn't quite get it to make a dot. And I ended up with these weird shapes. And that's just something that's going to happen. If you can't get the eraser to kind of mold into the shape you want, you are going to end up with some kind of funky shapes. So if you need something that is literally polka-dotted, then be a little bit careful about what eraser you choose for that. You can also find stick erasers that will do that even better. This is just testing the kneaded eraser in this fashion. Now this last test was rather the silly sandy what were you thinking test. I wanted to see if you could like draw around an object. So I wanted to draw around a ball. So I drew the circles and then did the powdered pigment on it. And then I thought, oh let me make it rounded. Let me put a highlight on it. Well then I need to add some shading and make it look really awesome. And then I realized this whole test in this last column became about how well sandy can shade as opposed to were these erasers actually performing very well at all. So I decided even though I was going to make each one of these look like a nice ball so that I would have a beautiful chart because I like pretty charts and pretty graphics. I would instead just do the test of seeing if each eraser could erase around the object because I knew I could get a highlight. That sort of thing. I just wanted to see if I could get a nice crisp outline. And again I ran into the same issue with some of these erasers if I couldn't get them into a nice pointed shape whatever the shape was. It got harder and harder to erase around something. And when you're working with graphite you're always going to get a smudge somewhere and you're going to have to erase in a white area and try to get it to come back to some kind of whiteness. And lots of these erasers performed admirably. But I have to say the one that did the absolute best in all of these tests from the beginning till now has been the Faber Castells. And granted they have the colored ones which are kind of cool. I do suspect that that yellow eraser is eventually going to become a very very sad very gray yellow kind of eraser and break my heart. So big congratulations to Faber Castell for having this awesome eraser that comes in a case so I can put it in my art bag with my charcoal and not end up with a black eraser. Since I'm posting this video on Harry Potter Day I thought it would be appropriate to do a portrait of Harry Potter. This is a very dark photo reference that I'm working from and has just crazy crazy amounts of shadow. But I'm going to begin by putting in some of the powdered graphite and start to initially create some of the softest shadows that are going to exist in this drawing which are going to be on his face. I could have used the powdered graphite and tried to apply it using a q-tip and some might try that but I wanted to have very soft edges to them and I knew I could achieve that with a kneaded eraser especially this Faber Castell because I can use very light pressure to lighten up on an edge and just barely touch the surface. And if I need to I can go back in and finesse some of these you know kind of lightest shadows using a q-tip but I wouldn't get the same effect if I tried to draw it with the q-tip. So erasing the highlights as a first step here is going to set this drawing off on the right foot. It's also going to tell me if I've got my proportions right in the drawing if I have that basic pencil sketch underneath looking right is it going to match what's in the photo reference that I was working from and then we're off with the pencil. You can see this nice 6B does make some nice black areas but it's also not a 9B it's not as dark as I generally like to work. I'm a 9B person that's just me and I will link you in the doobly-doo down below to two of the other drawings that I've done in my 9B pencil that make me very happy so if you are a pencil artist and you want to see more pencil work then feel free to watch those but I am working in various pressures to get different amounts of value different amounts of light and dark in the drawing and I'm working closely from the photo of course to get his face down I wanted to make sure that that was as good as possible because it's a portrait and I'm not a portrait artist I'm not a hyper-realist either I just like to draw and I wanted to see if I could draw Harry Potter. I'm working through adding in some of these values the whole right hand side is in very dark values however what was I going to do with the eye now this looks really freaky right now what I'm doing it in light colors because it's in dark shadow so it looks extra bright compared to the eye on the left just looks like something's not right well it's because all of that is in deep dark shadow there's a tiny highlight on the interior corner of his eye as well as two tiny highlights on the glasses and then a little bit on the frame of the glasses that go back toward his ear and throughout the drawing I'll keep going back to this area and revisiting the value in it partially to smooth out some of the pencil texture but also because I'm trying to match the value to the rest of the drawing there are people who seem capable of working on one eyeball and getting the value really perfect in that so that they never have to revisit it they just keep moving outward from whatever point they started at and I don't know it seems to work for them does not work for me because everything is seen in relation to the values around it and whether I get those values exactly perfect according to my reference or whether maybe I've gotten darker overall with my drawing that I needed to or lighter overall if I try to just match the photo then I'm not matching my drawing to itself and I wanted to make sure that my drawing stands on its own because you're not looking at this drawing based on what's in the photograph no one cares about that necessarily they're looking at the drawing as a piece of paper with pencil lines on it and I want to be sure that all of the areas that are the richest darkest black are the same level of rich dark black and that means I have to have all those areas in before I can judge whether or not I've gotten them right so in this first pass on the face and the hair I'm getting it as close as I can for the time being but I knew I was going to need to start working on the darker areas I haven't done a full drawing in this 6b pencil before and I wanted to be sure that it was going to be dark enough is if I was going to need to switch over to grab my 9b to really get a good dark black and what I found was with enough layers I could actually get that rich dark black with my 6b as well it just took longer and I was okay with that because the 9b when it skips over the surface of a piece of paper like a hot pressed watercolor paper it's not getting down into all those nooks and crannies in the paper and you're getting a nice average across the surface of the paper but you're not necessarily getting something really smooth and I wanted to see how smooth of a dark could I get using this 6b in my lead holder because you see when I work with a 9b pencil it takes a long time to get that pencil to be really sharp I have to use either a knife or a sanding block or something to really get that pencil so sharp that it fits in between all these lines but this pencil can get so sharp real quickly with a turn in the pencil sharpener that it's much easier to get that really fine point so that I can go in layer after layer after layer building up these rich darks a little bit more of the eraser action here thank you Faber-Castell for joining in the fun with this drawing and I'm just going to go over the outside edges I want this to look like it's a very soft fuzzy muted kind of candle flame not really bright because the brightest thing is going to be Harry and then start to blend it in with the background and create those darks again around the outside there's a window back there and just a few diamonds of the window in the top section everything in that background is going to just need to go darker and darker and darker even the windows I had to darken the color in them and use a cotton ball to blend it all and then redo those lines so that I would end up with something nice and rich and dark because nothing in the background is going to be as white as anything in Harry's face and even those light grays need to go a little bit darker to make him pop Harry's got a patch on his outfit and the patch has some highlights on it but I want to just bare minimum highlights and bare minimum detail because this whole thing is out of focus so not only can I not see it I could have looked up another patch online to make it look more like the patch not as much like a blob but I wanted it to fit in with the character of this which has all the focus on Harry's face for the candles in the background I changed my arrangement of them slightly to put them in places that would accommodate my big thumb print you can see there's a fingerprint on my paper that just ended up being there from the grease in my hand so always be careful when you're working with graphite because that can happen but I was able to put the darks all the way around those candles right over top of that place and to really fix that so it wasn't going to end up being an issue once all of this was kind of in place I went back to looking at the drawing as a whole and where are the areas that needed to be darker that left side of his hair needed to definitely go darker so that the white on the right side would be even wider I wanted it to be really bright in contrast and that really helped to darken that left hand side and adding in more shadows in there is possible once I have that whole dark area I don't want to just flatten it by putting more gray over it but I need to add more darks into the darks that are around them just looking at every single area to try to compare where the values are compared to everything else that I wanted in the drawing and I was really debating whether the right side of Harry's face would continue to go really black or whether I wanted for the drawing to have just enough of the eye showing and for now I opted for that I can always add more later I've added in the candle flames on the left hand side but I'm using a cotton ball to soften the color and pencil to go back in and carve the shape and then a little bit of the eraser again to make the points a little bit higher so that they feel more like candle flames this one on the right hand side which I had thought I had gotten right I wanted to match more to the ones on the left so shaved that one down just as I was working on the final flames in this drawing that was the time when I was at the very end of the last of my Harry Potter movie marathon so the timing worked out absolutely perfect to clean my hands I used the kneaded eraser to get the graphite off it works if the kneaded eraser is fairly new so if it's got enough absorbency that it can pull the pigment out of your fingers that's all to the good and then your kneaded eraser is also clean for your next adventure in drawing the last bit here is the tape reveal which was a big disappointment after all of this time in the drawing the tape pulled up the surface of this watercolor paper and I always forget that when I'm working with hot press watercolor paper this is the tape I use on everything else and it doesn't destroy anything except for Arch's hot press so it's going to have to be framed cutting in a little bit into the drawing so that you don't get any of that white kind of must-up paper on the outside but there you go my finished Harry Potter portrait for Harry Potter Day Bob Ross may always be telling us there are no mistakes in art however we know that we need an eraser from time to time if you found this video helpful interesting if it's going to help you in your artwork please feel free to use the tip jar down below this video which is a heart icon that says thanks and you can drop something in there you can also join the Patreon community where you get to do that every month whatever amount you choose and there are some extra goodies that you get for being a patron you can also take a class from me there are over a hundred classes on my website and I'm sure there's something that will help you grow in your own artwork links to everything are in the doobly-doo down below and the doobly-doo is that area called the description box underneath of the video and all the information you need on the supplies that I use to make today's drawing the link to this amazing winner of an eraser and so much more thank you so much I will see you again very soon go out and create something every day I'll see you next time