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Tucson artist Serena Rios McRae, known locally as Cactus Clouds Art, found internet fame in 2022 after posting her pink eraser art projects online, and inspiring her audience to use unconventional art materials to create their own works. 

Three years later, her following has grown to 157,000 on Instagram and more than 82,000 on TikTok between two accounts. Now, she is sharing everything she’s learned over the years about creating miniature prints in her new guidebook, “Pink Eraser Art: The Ultimate Guide to Carving Incredible Eraser Stamps,” set for an Oct. 21 release (published by Rocky Nook; list price $24.95 for paperback).

“It's for people who have been printmaking forever, but it's also for people who have never created anything before,” Rios McRae said.

The idea to create a book came to her through teaching her eraser carving skills and realizing how positively people responded to what she considers her “silly little art medium.”

“I had gotten so much feedback about how good carving erasers had been for people's emotions and mentality. People were literally telling me their self esteem was being boosted by taking time to create something every day,” Rios McRae said. “So it was a silly little art medium that was actually really helping people.”

Her hope is that her new book will help readers develop a therapeutic outlet through artistic exploration.

“It does so much for regulating emotions and thinking through processes, problem solving and all those things,” Rios McRae said. “It's just so good for us to do that.”

Rios McRae herself started her career as an artist back in 2018 as a way to process her struggles with mental health and postpartum depression. 

“I survived the hardest thing that I never knew I would experience, and I had to art about it,” Rios McRae said of that depression. "So I got an art desk that I set up in the corner of my bedroom, and I bought the cheapest set of watercolors for like $5 at Michael's, and I was like, ‘I have to make stuff.’”

As an artist, Rios McRae said she has always been very experimental, and she enjoys mixing different mediums. 

“I love learning stuff, and so whenever I discover a new art medium or a new process, I like to dive in and learn enough about it to explore it and make things,” she said. “My art experience is mostly just chasing the next shiny thing and learning what I can if it inspires me.”

In 2022, the family fell on hard times when Rios McRae’s husband was hospitalized, and although he returned home safe, the event still left her reeling.

“We’d gone through so much, I was like, ‘I need to make something with my hands so that I can process everything that I just went through',” she said. “It was such a high stress thing, but also, we drained our entire savings.” 

So, Rios McRae turned to the internet, and poured herself into her art.

“On Instagram, every October is a big art challenge month,” she said. “So people put up a prompt list with 31 days of prompts, and then you create art as a community, and everybody shares, and there was one that was printmaking.”

She decided to participate, not knowing that the online challenge would change her life.

“I was talking to a friend about it, and she was like, ’I just found this box of erasers in my office,’ and I was like, ‘you're so smart, I can afford a box of erasers.’ And so me and two other Instagram friends, we all ordered erasers, and we started doing that October art challenge together, carving into the erasers.”  

At the same time, Rios McRae said she had been working to figure out social media algorithms, and planned to use the project to test her theory. 

“So I started a TikTok account, and I called it pink eraser art, and I only posted those videos of my challenge, carving an eraser each day throughout October,” she said. “And my experiment was that I made it completely anonymous. So I didn't share my voice, I didn't share my face, you could only see my hands, and it was just about the art, and it wasn't about me. And within the first week, it went super viral.”

Rios McRae finished all 31 days of the challenge, and was having so much fun that she decided to make it a 100-day challenge.

“Once people were like, ‘how do I do this? I want to try,’ then I started sharing it over on my Instagram, and I started teaching tutorials,” Rios McRae said. “I would go live, and people could join me, and we would carve something together, so people could ask questions.”

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Her goal was to help her audience not feel as intimidated by starting a new art project or learning a new art form.

“The most common comment that I got from people was like, 'I loved doing this when I was a kid',” Rios McRae said. “Or, ‘I've always wanted to do this, and I've never done it before.’”

She said the pink erasers were like a cheat code, eliminating common obstacles and concerns.

“Any gatekeeping around printmaking just broke down by using pink erasers, because everybody has one, right? Or everybody has had one. Everybody knows where to buy a box of erasers. You don't have to go walk into an art store for the first time. Erasers are so small that you can sit down and you can make a full work of art in 20 minutes, and the amount of materials you need is very minimal.”

Staci Alatsis attended a recent workshop of Rios McRae’s at Di Luna Candles, and said she has been following her since she became popular for her pink eraser project. 

Alatsis said she tries to attend whenever Rios McRae is hosting a workshop, and that she was drawn to the idea of eraser carving because of the accessibility of the craft.

“Crafting, it can get really expensive, especially the stuff I've done,” she said.

Kat Cummings was another of the students at the class. Unlike Alatsis, she had never done carving or eraser art before, but said she was excited to learn a new craft and art medium.

“I love anything arts and crafts,” Cummings said, adding that she hoped to take her new skill and teach her friends. “I think it'd be a really fun activity to do together,” she said.

Piper Dominguez was also a newcomer to the world of pink eraser art.

“I just thought it looked like a lot of fun,” Dominguez said. “I am an artist, so I like to explore different mediums.”

Rios McRae said her new book acts as a guide in teaching eraser carving, covering things like printmaking basics, positive and negative space and carving safety.

“I've been teaching online, and some in-person classes, and I went through and I wrote down all the questions that have come up and things that people have asked me, and I used all of those questions as an outline,” she said. 

Each chapter has an activity at the end to help readers practice their skills.

“Because I have ADHD, I've learned that one of the big things that teachers struggle with with kids with ADHD, is that we have a hard time picturing things that we haven't seen,” Rios McRae said. “With that in mind, everything in the book has step-by-step pictures so you can see every single step and how it's done.”

She said the book is also surprisingly personal. 

“I've had a few people who've read it already, because it's been available on ebook for a couple months, and the first review that I got, somebody said they cried through the whole thing, and they felt like when they were doing the activities, I was sitting next to them,” Rios McRae said.

While the official release date for “Pink Eraser Art” is Oct. 21, Stacks Bookclub, at , will host an official book launch party on Oct. 26 from 6-8 p.m., featuring a reading from Rios McRae, a meet-and-greet photo line and an exclusive stamp-your-own-bookmark bar.

“They're going to make a menu of drinks that are all going to be pink which is cute,” Rios McRae said. “And there's going to be an activity table so people can stamp their own bookmarks with erasers.”

The tickets to the event are free, but Rios McRae said that if you haven't yet purchased a book, they're asking that you purchase the book at the event.

“We want to support the bookstore for supporting me,” she said. “But, yeah, it's gonna be fun.”