I bought some colored pencils last night to draw some sketches of the wonderful suits of armor I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet I find myself frustrated by the same thing that has frustrated me since I was five years old - colored pencils can’t be erased. You make a mistake, you’re stuck with it. You can erase it to a point, but even after that, the streak of color is still visible. They market “erasable” colored pencils now, with their own built in erasers, but the truth is that even these are not really erasable. They still leave a residue of color that’s impossible to remove. At least the last time I bought “erasable” colored pencils, this is how they were. Have they been improved since then, or something? Is it possible to buy a set of colored pencils that are genuinely erasable the same way that a regular graphite pencil would be? If anyone knows, please point me to a link where I can purchase them. If there is indeed no way to truly erase colored pencil, my question is then, why is this? Is the chemical composition of a colored pencil’s “lead” such that it’s impossible to completely erase from paper?
IMLE, they don’t seem to be made of graphite at all. Wiki seems to support my impression that the somewhat shiny cores are more wax than anything, and hence not much more erasable than a crayon:
My (now somewhat distant) experience with good color pencils is that they are made with all different kinds of pigments, which you can tell by the fact that they break and act differently. Some colors are more brittle, some spread better, some cannot be applied as softly as others. This suggests to me that their chemistry is varied enough that one eraser might not erase them all. Maybe you could create an eraser for every color, but that sounds like a rather extreme design challenge.
Plus, as Huerta mentions, they are often waxy, which makes them harder to remove from an absorbent paper.
Although the word ‘pencil’ is used in both cases, you’re really talking about two quite distinct things. In a normal pencil, the ‘lead’ is actually graphite, which can be erased with almost 100% success. In a coloured pencil, the ‘lead’ is usually wax-based, because wax is a good carrier for pigment. The wax doesn’t erase very well, and in most cases you can only ‘erase’ it to the extent that you can scrape off the surface layer of paper.
So the answer in simple terms is because graphite and wax are different.
I would also point out that even regular pencils do not erase completely unless you draw very lightly with them.
Nope.
I’m a big fan of Col-Erase pencils. I use them for editing and diagrams and stuff. They erase well enough that I can tell that whatever I’ve erased isn’t supposed to be there anymore, but the marks are definitely still clearly visible.
HAve you tried aquarelles? They don’t seem at all waxy to me.
Of course, the difference between a graphite pencil and a colour pencil is the difference between something being dirty, and something being dyed.
Just to expand on this, pencil leads are a mixture of clay and graphite powder which is then kiln-fired. The relative amounts of these in the mix determine the lead’s hardness: More graphite and you have a softer lead; more clay and you have a harder one.
I’ve found these two links to be extremely useful for choosing erasable colored lead:
As you can see, there are two sorts of “erasable” lead pencils - those that actually erase with erasers, and those that disappear after exposure to sunlight.
You would think that colors that disappear with sun exposure would be a detriment. I mean, I doubt any of us would create something beautiful and then want to keep it in a dark room all the time…
It is good if you are using the coloured pencil to make a rough sketch before inking over it, as many illustrators and animators do. Saves you the work of erasing everything - after inking it, just let it sit in the sun for a while and the rough work will magically disappear.
Although, if you’re using light blue lead, it won’t show up when you scan it in greyscale anyway.