How to Erase in Krita (E Toggles Eraser Mode)

Pressing E in Krita switches the brush you are currently holding into erase mode, and pressing E again switches it back. There is no separate eraser tool, which is the single most common misunderstanding among people arriving from Photoshop, GIMP or Procreate. **What actually happens.** Erase mode changes the brush's compositing behaviour from adding paint to removing it. Every other property is untouched — size, opacity, texture, pressure curve, spacing, the lot. A rough bristle preset erases with that same rough bristle character. A soft round airbrush erases with a soft falloff. A pattern brush removes paint in the shape of its pattern. **Why this is a better default than a dedicated eraser.** When you erase into an area you have just painted, a generic hard-edged eraser leaves a mechanical boundary that does not match anything around it, and subsequent strokes have to work to disguise it. Erasing with the same brush that made the marks produces an edge with the same quality as the paint on either side of it, so the removal is invisible as an operation. For a painting application, where most erasing is corrective rather than wholesale clearing, that is the more useful behaviour by a wide margin. **The trade-off, and the surprise it causes.** Because erase mode inherits the current brush, the character of your erasing changes every time you switch presets. Someone who last painted with a large textured brush and then presses E to clean up a small detail gets a large textured erase, which is rarely what they had in mind. The fix is not a different shortcut — it is treating brush choice as part of the erase decision. Some painters keep a preset they think of as their eraser and switch to it deliberately, which reproduces the dedicated-tool workflow while keeping the flexibility available. **Erase mode is per-brush and it persists.** Leaving a preset in erase mode and returning to it later means your first stroke removes paint instead of adding it. If a brush is behaving destructively for no apparent reason, check the erase toggle in the toolbar before concluding the preset is broken — it is by far the most likely explanation. **When you want to clear rather than erase.** Removing everything inside a selection, or an entire layer's contents, is not a brush job. Delete clears the selected area, and Shift+Backspace fills with the foreground colour where Backspace alone fills with the background — those are the right tools for wholesale removal, and they are instant rather than requiring you to cover the region with strokes. **A non-destructive alternative worth knowing.** Erasing removes pixels permanently once the undo history rolls past. Adding a transparency mask to the layer and painting black on it hides the same pixels while keeping them recoverable — paint white on the mask and they return. The erase toggle is the right choice for confident corrections during a painting pass; a mask is the better one when you are hiding something you may want back, such as trying a composition with and without an element. Both use the same brush and the same E toggle, so the technique transfers directly.