How to Quickly Clean a Messy Drawing
Mackenzie SwensonDescription
Drawing often starts with blocking in, broad gestural movements, or other lightly sketched lines. Artist Mackenzie Swenson finds that whenever she starts a drawing, she quickly has lines that are obsolete, too dark, or even smudged on her paper from where her hand may have dragged across the drawing. But she doesn’t worry because she knows how to gradually lighten those extra graphite marks quickly and easily so that she keeps only the information she wants. Mackenzie lightens all the marks on the drawing at once, which allows her to continue to refine her drawing.
Mackenzie uses a kneaded eraser, which is an eraser you can manipulate by rolling, pinching, or stretching it into whatever shape you want. Mackenzie says if she were to use a traditional eraser and rub it back and forth across her drawing, she would risk dragging the graphite across the paper, making the problem worse. However, Mackenzie rolls her kneaded eraser into the shape of a rolling pin and then rolls that eraser over the entire paper. This technique evenly lightens all the lines and doesn’t displace graphite from one area to another. Mackenzie’s wispy lines mostly disappear and everything else gets a little lighter while remaining visible. The lines and details she wants remain, while the light gestural marks she may have laid down early in the process are gone. Once this is done, the paper is now ready to receive another stage of refinements. Mackenzie says she can now make more specific decisions about her drawing without fighting the graphite already on the paper.
Hi, I'm Mackenzie Swenson, and welcome to How To Quickly Clean A Messy Drawing. Whenever I'm starting a drawing, I find that at least once or twice toward the beginning stage of the process, I've got lots of extra searching lines, and sometimes my lines have gotten a bit too dark or maybe I've been dragging the side of my hand across my paper and things have gotten a little smudgy. And there's a really, really easy way, if you find this happening at the beginning of your drawings, or at any stage, for you to grow gradually lighten everything up. So you still have all of the information in place but everything is, the really light lines have disappeared, and everything just kind of gets a little bit lighter, so you can reapproach it with a little bit more specificity. What you're gonna need for this is a kneaded eraser.
And so it's just an eraser that you're able to manipulate with you know, rolling it or stretching it into whatever shape you want. So for this technique, what I'll do is I'll roll it between my hands to make kind of a rolling pin. And you can see here, I've got lots of lines from, you know, big kind of gestural sweeps. And some things are maybe a little messy or darker than I want them to be, but I've got a lot of useful information that I found. And if I were to go in and just kind of go across like this, it would end up dragging the graphite and it would get very uneven and make the problem worse actually.
But if I roll this into this little bit of a rolling pin and then actually just go over the whole drawing, all of the really light kind of whispery lines, mostly disappear, and everything I've got gets a little bit lighter, but it's still visible. And any of the smudginess is gone and it's all been done fairly evenly. So from here, it would be very pretty effortless to now go in and make another stage of refinements and be able to make more specific decisions without fighting against the graphite that's already on the paper. And that is how to quickly clean a messy drawing.
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