Review: Sakura/Rabbit Foam Pure Slim Eraser

 

Sakura/Rabbit Foam Pure Slim eraser

When drawing, I don’t have much need for erasers. When some people hear that, they think I’m bragging, as if it means I don’t make mistakes. It’s not that at all – it’s just that my approach is to allow most “wrong” marks and lines to remain, and they usually disappear or fade away behind the restated lines and color or shading. In most cases, I appreciate allowing my process to be visible.

If anything, I use an eraser more as a drawing tool than a correction tool: With graphite, it’s an essential companion for putting in highlights. It can work that way with colored pencils too, but that’s a lot trickier – colored pencil pigment is more difficult to remove than graphite.

For a long time now, my two standard erasers have been a basic gray kneadable art eraser (I’ve had mine so long that I can’t remember what brand it is; I think it’s a Faber-Castell) and, for tiny spots, the Tombow Mono Zero retractable. Both are great with graphite, but neither is ideal with colored pencils.

Recently I had heard that the Sakura (also known by the name Rabbit) Foam Pure Slim eraser was excellent with colored pencils, so I gave it a try. Below are the test results on two types of paper: Stillman and Birn Alpha, which has a light tooth, and Stillman & Birn Epsilon, which is relatively smooth (though not as smooth as Bristol Smooth drawing paper). The test materials were a soft core Blackwing graphite pencil, a Faber-Castell Polychromos (oil-based) colored pencil and a Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle colored pencil (the latter is especially difficult for any non-electric eraser to remove).

As expected, the Sakura Pure Slim did fine with graphite. It also did much better than the Tombow with colored pencil, even three layers of Museum Aquarelle on toothy Alpha.

The Sakura leaves stringy crumbs.

The Pure Slim’s downside is that it is very soft, so a sharp edge or corner will disappear after one erasure. That means it’s almost impossible to make a tiny or slender erasure (which is the firmer Tombow Zero’s primary skill). Cutting a clean edge with a knife before erasing would help. The Pure Slim also has the annoying habit of leaving behind lots of long strings of crumbs (see right). The strings are easy enough to brush away (or vacuum up with one of these adorable eraser dust cleaners, which I don’t have but probably should).

I’ve tried lots of erasers (in case you missed it, I did an eraser rub-off challenge at the Well-Appointed Desk), but I haven’t found any non-electric that is as effective as the Sakura Foam Pure Slim. Its softness makes it less than ideal for tiny spots, but it’s good enough to keep in my tool kit.