A tortillon (or Blending Stump) is a cylindrical drawing tool, tapered at the ends and usually made of rolled paper, used by artists to smudge or blend marks made with charcoal, Conté crayon, pencil or other drawing media.
A blending stump is similar to a tortillon but is longer, more tightly wrapped, and pointed at both ends. Tortillons produce slightly different textures than stumps when blending, and they also are hollow, as opposed to stumps being solid.
Cleaning of tortillons and stumps usually involves removing the used outer layer of paper by scraping or rubbing the implement on an abrasive surface, such as sandpaper, carpet, pink rubber erasers, or an emery board.
A tortillon is a tightly rolled sheet of paper, the inside of which is pushed out into a pencil shape and used by pencil, pastel and charcoal artists to blend and push colour around on the drawing paper, softening edges and graduating tones. You may want to try experimenting with various types of paper, the commercial tortillons that I've come across are made from a rather loose fibre paper, similar to thin blotting paper but I've found that just about any paper will do. I make mine from ordinary copy paper straight out of my printer. Very little practice is required to produce your own homemade tortillon.
pronounced tort-till-on