Erasing is part of many airbrush artist's skills. When spraying with waterborne acrylics, there is a distinction between easily erasable and difficult to erase paints. Easy to erase paints (to my knowledge) are:
- Holbein Aeroflash
- Lukas Illu-Color
- E'tac
- Createx
A difficult to erase paints are Auto-Air and Wicked. There are also different types of erasers. In this blog entry I will discuss the manual type eraser pencils, which are often used by artists who create detailed fine art.
In the image below you see three eraser pencils that I use. From top to bottom they are the well known Faber-Castell Perfection 7058, The Pentel Clic Eraser which is refillable and the Tombo Mono Zero, also refillable. To be able to successfully erase sprayed areas a good quality airbrush paper or airbrush board is required. Hansa airbrush paper is a bright white paper that consists of rags and is excellently erasable, although it requires several layers to reach full coverage. The Schoellershammer paper and board have a hot pressed ceramic mix top layer and are superb surfaces for airbrush artists to work on.
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| Eraser pencils |
The Faber-Castell eraser is suited to remove a lot of paint, resulting in hard edged erased areas. It is excellently suited to erase highlights. The Pentel and the Tombo remove much less paint and are perfectly suited to subtly erase gradual areas - the Pentel for larger areas and the Tombo for smaller areas.
I also noticed that thinner based Inspire paint is excellently erasable, similar to HOK uros used to be. Provided of course that a sufficient number of (white) base layers is properly applied beneath the image colors. The Pentel and Tombo allow to erase subtle gradual areas with this paint. They don't damage the base layers once you removed the color layers and leave a flush surface to continue spraying that leaves no marks when colored paint is re-applied over the erased areas. This property makes them suited to remove over-spray as well as highlights.
