There is an artist’s aid made of a lens and a mirror in a stand together. When placed on a table with a sheet of paper underneath, it projects an image onto the paper of whatever scene is in front of the table. The lens and the mirror are up in the air, and the paper is accessible, so the artist can draw on the paper, following the image visible there.
What are these things called?
Where can they be purchased?
Thanks!
Incidentally, you can also use an ordinary overhead projector; as I observed in a classroom in high school.
Actually sounds more like the OP is talking about the ralated camera lucida. As far as buying one, the links on the Wiki page there only seem to lead to antiques for sale at over $2000 a piece.
That was my first thought. But the OP mentioned that the image is projected onto the paper while, per the Wiki link you provided, ‘No image is projected by the camera lucida.’
It isn’t all that easy using a camera lucida (and maybe a camera obscura, too).
David Hockney, an artist, tried a CamObs and had to work pretty hard to do what seems to be average artwork.
See his book, Secret Knowledge. Lots of folks are dismissive of his book’s argument, but I am not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion.
But Vermeer also used one - and to deleriously beautiful effect.
Caravaggio, and no doubt lots of others used COs, I think.
If you pursue the drawing aid - obscura or lucida, I hope you show us your work someday, and I hope you knock us all out.
They’reall over the place.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=camera+lucida+for+sale&aq=1&oq=camera+lucida
BarnOwl, easier than painting or drawing free-hand?
Q
I think thisis what you are looking for. This brand are of the best quality.
I was originally skeptical, but after reading I’m a believer.
Google “drawing projector” . I think that’s what you’re looking for.
Something like this
The short answer, according to Hockney, is no.
In Secret Knowledge, page 24, he writes, "The camera lucida is not easy to use. Basically it is a prism on a stick that creates the illusion of an image of whatever it is in front of it on a piece of paper below. The image is not real - it is not actually on the paper, it only seems to be there. When you look through the prism from a single point you can see the person or objects in front and the paper below at the same time. If you’re using the camera lucida to draw, you can also see see your hand and pencil making marks on the paper. But only you, sitting in the right position, can you see these things, no one else can. Because it is portable and can be carried anywhere, the camera lucida is perfect for drawing landscapes. But portraiture is more difficult.
You must use it quickly, for once the eye has moved the image is really lost. A skilled artist could make quick notations, marking the key points of the subject’s features. In effect this is a fast forward of the normal measuring process that takes place in the head of a good draughtsman but which usually takes much longer.
After these notations have been made, the hard work begins of observing from life and translating the marks into a more complete form. I tried to use the camera lucida myself for a year, drawing hundreds of portraits with it, including those of the National Gallery guards on the next page.
I wish you could see his camera lucida. It’s very simple, kind of elegant. Not like the devices suggested by **don’t fight **or luck henry. If I can find it on the web I’lll post a link.
Hah!!
Photo right out of the book - page 25 in fact. Lousy repro, but you might get the idea.
BTW, Hockney used both devices - camera obscura and camera lucida, as I sort of semi inferred in my posts here.
I also have a book, Vermeer’s Camera, in which his use of the C obscura is described. Quite good.
Thanks very much BarnOwl, you might have just saved me some money, as I was thinking of trying one of those and getting back into sketching/watercoloring.
I guess my next question would be, are those “drawing projectors” referenced in a previous post a better alternative or just the same thing under a different name?
Intriguing that Hockney wrote one must use the image “quickly”. Sounds like you have to keep yourself absolutely rigid to keep from losing it.
Thanks again!
Quasi
Quasi,
Just in case you didn’t view it, please check out the video at
You use the lucida to pencil sketch the outlines. You can then paint in the details. It might not be all that hard after all. And the video tells you to mark the key points, so even if you move you can get back to your original view.
If I had an ounce of talent, I’d give it a try. Honest.
Good luck!!
Folks, thank you, this is enlightening.
I think it is probably the Camera Lucida that I remember seeing years ago. Johnny L.A. is most perceptive to note that my description rules that out, but my best guess now is that I misunderstood what I was reading at the time. I think it may have been 40 or more years since I read about these and I have never seen one or talked with a user. To be very precise, in optics we speak of “real images” and “virtual images”, the distinction being whether the light that forms the image actually passes through the image. When you look at yourself in a mirror, it’s a virtual image you’re seeing, and it’s behind the wall, with no image light anywhere near it. But I mean a real image, so Johnny is correct.
I don’t know what to make of the Camera Obscura. I always understood the latin “camera” to refer to a room in a house or building, and thought that other latin words like “atrium” would be better for the typical way we use “chamber” today. So, I have heard of rooms with a huge lens and a white wall on opposite faces, such as a museum might put together.
In the years since I last saw this, I have pictured something like a projection TV lens, with several inches of aperture and with optics of much lower quality than cameras, on a stand with a mirror behind it so it projects a real image onto the plane on which the apparatus sits, on spindly open legs that are pretty much out of the artist’s way. This is closer to a camera obscura than anything else here, except the chamber is not enclosed (so it isn’t really a chamber). I guess you’d have to mostly shield this space to keep stray light manageable, so maybe it is a chamber after all.
In any case it’s not the opaque projector, which does the opposite of what I want - it looks at what is on the paper and projects it out into the space in front, and I want to collect light from what is out in space in front and project it onto paper.
I think the camera lucidas sold at several of the linked sites are probably the thing, but I am worried about this one note:
“You must use it quickly, for once the eye has moved the image is really lost.”
I can’t quite picture whether the artist’s eye has to be precisely maintained in position, and whether the artist can move and then return to the proper position. Some of these seem to require that you get part of the pupil of your eye above the edge of a prism, and some below, which would be pretty taxing. Others seem to use a large semisilvered mirror; maybe these make it easy to move around slightly.
Most interesting. Anybody know about the movement issue?
Napier,
If you click on the link immediaely above your last post, you’ll see a video link that shows a camera obscura, and after that, a camera lucida in use.
In the C. lucida narration you learn what to do about “You must use it quickly, for once the eye has moved the image is really lost.”
I’m beginning to suspect that Hockney may have overstated this. You look at the projected image make a few marks on the paper, of key points in your drawing.
So if your eye moves you simply move your head a bit until you see them all as you did in their original alignment and continue with your drawing.
Hockney also stresses puttibg marks on your early drawing.
Watch the video and I think a lot of your fears will disappear.
It sounds to me like they’re saying that the device involves a virtual image, and that you can see the virtual image from different angles, but that if you start your drawing with it at one angle, it won’t line up at other angles.
Yes. You make your marks of key points. If you’re drawing a portrait head-on,there’s very little foreshortening to speak of. But if you’re drawing from below, your marks would be quite different.
In his book, Hockney shows a 4 or 5 paintings in which the heads are paintedhead-on—at the artist’s eye level—but the overall views of the painting are from below. I never would would have picked up on this if he hadn’t mentioned it, and I still have difficulty “seeing” the head-on-ness.
Portrait of a Genovese Lady and Her Son, van Dyck 1626
On further review, what I’ve been labeling “head-on,” Hockney calls “straight on.”
Anyway, this is an example of the face being painted straight on, but the view is clearly from below.
In Secret Knowledge, Hockney says, "The proportions here seem very odd. Why? Although we think we are looking up at the woman from a low position, her face is seen straight on—we do not see the underside of her nose, as we should—and yet the boy’s face is also straight on. Now look how far away the heads are from each other, even though they’re supposed to be holding hands. And where are the lady’s feet? It’s only when you see this that you notice how huge she is—if she stood up, she’d be about twelve feet tall!
It hardly seems possible that both the mother and son were sitting in front of the artist at the same time. They must have been painted separately and pieced together as a montage. And the lady’s face face must have been painted at a different time from her dress. There are certainly many viewpoints here. One begins to realize that any full-length portrait must have at least two viewpoints, to get the details in the face you have to be quite close, to see the whole figure you have to move back some distance, or paint in sections with multiple viewpoints.
I think the key difference is that a camera lucida reflects the image directly into your eye, while a camera obscura projects the image onto a plane surface.
The simple CL in the above mentioned video is just a half-mirrored glass. It partly reflects your subject of interest, and partly transmits your drawing surface, so one seems to be superimposed on the other. The relationship of the two images changes if you move your eye, so you start by marking a few points of reference to help you hold the correct angle.
Because the camera lucida image is superimposed in your eye, there’s no direct way to record it, other than tracing. (BTW: I’ve encountered the viewpoint-shifting problem mentioned by BarnOwl myself. Not being an artist, I often make line art illustrations by tracing a photograph in Illustrator. If the subject is changed, I either have to take pains to shoot it from the exact same angle and distance, or I simply start over from scratch.)
A camera obscura uses a lens (or pinhole) to project light from the subject of interest directly onto a flat surface. The image is always the same as long as the subject, lens, and projection surface don’t move.
Cameras obscura (camerae obscurae?) are all around us, but we just call them “cameras.” The “hidden chamber” is the light-tight space behind the lens where the projection surface is placed. Usually the image is recorded on light-sensitive film or a digital sensor, but early cameras often had a ground glass at the film plane on which you could view the image directly before loading film. Before photo emulsion existed, you could trace the projected image by hand.
A very large camera might project the image on a wall, so you actually stand inside the camera to view the image, and the image is close to life size. There’s a portrayal of this in the movie “Addicted to Love,” in which the protagonist sets up a camera obscura in a room across from his estranged girlfriend’s apartment and watches her movements in the projection. The movie does neat things with the idea, although the effect might have been artificially enhanced. In reality I suspect the “camera” room would have to be very dark, and the girlfriend’s apartment would have to be very, very brightly lit, to produce such a large, bright projection.
Other projectors (for slides, movies, art, etc.), are basically the same thing turned around, so a small recorded image or drawing is projected as an enlargement. In fact, I gather some view camera models have been used to shoot negatives, then fitted with a light source behind the focal plane to make enlargements through the same lens.