If you've always wanted to draw or paint like an Old Master, then the vital piece of equipment you were missing to help you reach your goal was the camera lucida.
Once a common tool for artists, architects, illustrators and anyone else drawing from life, a camera lucida (literally "light room") lets its user trace the image of what they see. Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin -- both art professors, from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Carnegie Mellon University respectively -- want to bring it back, with a Kickstarter raising funds to manufacture a cheap and simple modern version they call the NeoLucida.
Garcia and Levin subscribe to the controversial theory expounded in David Hockney's Secret Knowledge that the great advances made in western art during the Enlightenment were made possible by the parallel advances in optic technology. Better lenses and mirrors, and devices like the camera obscura, made drawing from life easier than ever before. The camera lucida was one of these tools.
Read more: Wired
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