How to Make a Blending Stump

Hey! I'm Darlene, and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. Today I'll show you how to make a blending stump. A blending stump is a tool made of tightly rolled paper. Its soft texture can help smooth out your drawing, and with some graphite residue stuck to it, you can even use it to draw and shade. To make one, you'll need tape, a medium grit sandpaper, scissors, a razor, and soft paper. You can tell how soft a paper is by looking at how frayed a ripped edge is. I'd recommend trying this tutorial with various types of paper to find the one that best suits your needs. Grab your paper of choice. The first step is to cut out a rectangle. The exact dimensions aren't important, but in case you want to know, these are the rough dimensions of the one that I'll be cutting out in a second. Later I'll show you how to customize your blending stump for thickness, length, and comfortability. Let's make one first. Cut out your rectangle. I'm going to roll this from right to left, but this edge is going to be very difficult to roll tightly since it's so long. To make this process easier, we're going to cut this top corner off. I'm measuring about two thumbs up because I'm going to be rolling it with two thumbs. Now it'll be much easier to roll. If you can roll it super tight without cutting the corner off, that's recommended. Next, all we have to do is roll it as tightly as we can straight to the other side. To assist with that, put the paper between your scissors and finger and pull it through several times until it curls up. Use your thumb and index finger to roll the edge back and forth until it becomes tighter. It does help if your fingers are moist. This part is the most important step because the pointiness of your blending stump depends on how dense the very beginning of the roll is. Here's an example of a badly rolled, loose blending stump. Anyway, the reason we want a pointy blending stump is it makes it a lot easier to blend small details within your drawing. Precision blending. Once you've got it under control, roll straight across to the other side, using the bottom edge of your paper as a guide. Now, I couldn't get it to roll perfectly straight across, but that's okay because it's close enough. Hold on tight and let's tape this closed. Look for the end that's not hollow and sharpen it using a razor so that the blending stump looks like a pencil. To smooth out any hard edges, sand it with a medium grit sandpaper. This process also makes the paper fuzzy, which is what makes it blend so well. I'm using a block of sandpaper from the art store, but you can also get some from the hardware store as well. I'd recommend a medium grit, like 100 or finer. A coarse sandpaper will chew the paper right up, creating a very bumpy, uneven surface, which we don't want. Now it's time for a test. Let's see how well it'll blend. Let's see how well it draws using the side and tip. The graphite seems to spread very well, and the tip looks as though it can blend and draw small details. This one's definitely a winner. Make a few more blending stumps using different types of paper you have laying around the house to find the best blending stump that suits your personal needs, and test each one against each other. Maybe you'll find that one type of paper is too soft for precision blending because the tip is not stiff enough, but maybe the side allows you to blend very smoothly. I made this second blending stump out of even softer paper than the first. It spreads and grabs onto the graphite super well. Because the paper is so soft, the tip is not pointy or stiff enough to handle precision work. If I use the tip to blend detailed areas, they may end up looking too fuzzy. Besides using different types of paper to make this, you can also customize your blending stump for increased coverage and comfortability. For example, this one's longer and much easier to hold, like a pencil. To make a long ergonomic blending stump like this, you'll need to extend the rectangle shape that you cut, so it's longer this way. To make a thicker blending stump, one that can blend a large area in one single swipe, extend your rectangle this way. If you run out of paper, try taping another piece on the end. I hope you found this tutorial helpful and easy to follow. If you like it, please hit that like button and subscribe for more art-related videos like this. Don't forget to hit the notification bell. Thanks for watching!