Cleaning, maintaining and preserving your Drawing material

2. Caring for your tools with leads

The leads in graphite pencils and color pencils often break, even inside their wood casings. Protect them from shocks. When working with several pencils at once, avoid constantly laying them down and picking them up again. It's better to hold them in the hand that isn't drawing.

To properly clean your color pencils after sharpening them, pass over the lead with a paintbrush to remove the color residue. 

Tip: Sharpen your pencils by hand. Sharpening your pencils with a knife or utility knife gives you better control of the form, length and support you give to your lead. You can also use lead in a mechanical pencil, which is more solid.

3. Clean your erasers

If your eraser soils your drawing, it's too dirty...

• Clean classical erasers by rubbing them with a cotton cloth or washing them in soapy water (don't forget to dry them before using them).
• Kneaded erasers are self-cleaning. By kneading them, you enclose the charcoal pigment inside the eraser and use a clean part. When the eraser becomes saturated with pigment, throw it out.

4. Fix your media

Charcoal, dry sanguine and chalk are all unstable media. To preserve your creations, fix them on the paper. 

Note: Not all fixatives are the same! Avoid using your pastel fixative. There are specific fixatives for charcoal, chalk and pencil, available as sprays or bottled. In the case of bottles, apply the fixative using a fixative syringe from about 40 cm away.