Wapsi Square Forum

Hello fellow Waspians! (Wapsonians? Wapsites? Wapsironians.... whatever.)

Have an artistic bent and trying to work out the kinks? Can you trace lines on paper? Want do to both at once? This may be your chance!

If you've heard of a pinhole camera, or a camera obscura, you know you get to see a live image of something, just upside down on a screen. But there is also a device called a Camera Lucida, which uses a prism to let you see a right-side-up image by looking through it. The slick part is you can arrange things to "see" that image on a piece of paper, and then use that to trace the image!

The Camera Lucida is credited with letting some of the 17th and 18th Century masters create some of their insanely accurate and detailed works, such as Van Eyck, who here included the image of the BACK of the people he was painting as seen in the mirror behind them!

Eh, so what you say? A recent Kick Starter campaign by NeoLucida was quickly sold out of their up-to-date reworking of this old and proven artists tool. So -- they made more!

Don't mean to be a shill, but of the 3,000 they've put up on Amazon (link in the NeoLucida site), they're now two short (MINE!) and likely going fast at only $47 each. That's what: a modest easel, a minimal set of decent colored pens, or a few tablets of Bristol. Do the math.

Enjoy!

I used to see ads in comic books selling those for amounts a comic reader in the 60s could afford.

This is not the gadget that's basically a vertical pane of glass that lets you see the reflection of the subject on one side while you guide the pen on the other, is it? That produces a mirror image; this is a prism?

*edit* Okay, just saw the gadget on their website, but don't see how it could project a bright enough image; the concept kind of reminds me of the old opaque projectors.....

*edit again* Wikipedia explains how it works.... We used to do microscope sketches with one eye on the eyepiece and the other looking down at an adjacent paper and pencil. Camera lucida puts both images in one eye. Hrm.

NOTDilbert wrote:*edit again* Wikipedia explains how it works.... We used to do microscope sketches with one eye on the eyepiece and the other looking down at an adjacent paper and pencil. Camera lucida puts both images in one eye. Hrm.

Looks like there's actually an either-or thing, with most of your visual field either showing the object being drawn or the paper, and just a small transition zone in which your pupil allows you to see an "overlap".

Pretty slick, though... enough so that I just decided to spend a bit of this quarter's toy budget, and ordered one.

I wonder if adding a beam splitter into the optic path would help - one eye could then have a full field of view of both paper and subject; depends on how much brightness loss there is due to the half-silvering in the beam splitter, and whether the image-righting would be affected.