That’s because you don’t press the color so deeply into the tooth of the paper. Yes, applying color with lighter pressure makes lifting color easier.

The more color on the paper, the more difficult removing it becomes. Even combining some of the tools mentioned above removes only a limited amount of color. If you work on traditional drawing papers, it doesn’t matter what method you use to lift color. But even they do not completely remove heavily applied color. I’ve had success lifting color using mounting putty, masking tape, transparent tape, and what I call a click eraser, shown below. I have no personal experience with those, so I don’t know how they work on heavily applied color. Other artists recommend Tombow Mono erasers. I don’t know exactly what that is, but I imagine those old typing erasers that look like a pencil with plastic bristles on the end. Some artists use what they call an ink eraser. Try to erase them with a regular eraser, and what happens? You may remove some color, but you’re more likely to smudge and smear it around, making a bigger mess.īut does that mean you can’t remove color once it’s on the paper? Is Erasing a Reality?Įrasing is a reality if you use the right kind of eraser. Oil-based pencils contain more oil than wax.īoth oil and wax resist removal once they’re on paper. Wax-based pencils contain more wax than oil. Colored pencils, on the other hand, are made with a binding agent that includes wax and oil in differing amounts.

Prismacolor colored pencil eraser