As mentioned yesterday, after a couple of days painting the beaches of Port Macquarie, I started using my Eradicator. “THE Eradicator” (this is what is written on the brush handle) by Rosemary Brushes is a stiff synthetic brush used for lifting and cleaning up edges. Find out more about it here.

I’ve had a Medium Eradicator in my everyday kit since the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Chicago in 2017 and there is a real fun story about how I discovered it! I was sitting behind the Rosemary counter chatting to Symi when a sketcher came up and asked me what the eradicator was used for (thinking I was from Rosemary brushes). Symi, who was looking through my sketchbook at the time, started to demonstrate how the Eradicator can clean up edges using one of my sketches – without realising what she was doing. It was one of my ink and wash warm up sketches so her touch up was fine but we had a good laugh about it afterwards.

I haven’t talked about my Eradicator much.. hmm, I don’t think I ever mentioned it online.. but it’s lived in my toothbrush holder since 2017.  I mainly use it to soften a few hard edges (such as in skies), for the occasional lifting (such as horizontal lines in water) and sometimes to create fun textures using it as a normal brush.

During my time at Port Macquarie I discovered that it’s really good for creating rough edges and I started using it for waves. Then I began using it to create rectangular strokes for the rocks, and fun texture for trees.

If you are signed up for Foundations, I’ll be doing a mini demo of it in Livestream 1 today! 🙂

As it doesn’t hold a lot of water, my sketches were drier than normal. There was also a danger of damaging the paper surface so this is not something I would recommend. But it was a fun experiment! 

Here are my Eradicator sketches…

Two views of Oxley Beach done entirely with The Eradicator

Two sketches of Shelly Beach (using the Eradicator again) and a lovely lunch at Drury’s Lane.

A quick sketch of Town Beach. I used my usual 1/2 inch dagger for the sky and sand, and the Eradicator for the rest.

Another dagger and Eradicator sketch of Flynn’s Beach. I was sitting in the full sun doing this and my watercolour felt very dry…

…so I went back to dagger for this quick sketch which I managed to squeeze in before meeting a friend for coffee.

Final sketch of my Port Macquarie trip – back at Shelly Beach during low tide. I had a lot of fun creating the foreground texture in this one.

This was a fun little experiment – I moved away from using the Eradicator during the second week of my break and focused more on dry brush and using a Rosemary Travel filbert! But you will have to wait to find out more about that. 🙂

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