**The Magic of Drawing with Optics: A New Level of Creativity**

When it comes to drawing, most of us rely on traditional mediums like pencils, charcoal, or paint. However, what if I told you that there's a new way to create art that's not only innovative but also breaks the rules of conventional drawing? Meet the Neolucid XL, an optical device that allows artists to draw with unprecedented ease and flexibility.

**The Original Concept**

The original Optics concept was designed by innovators who wanted to push the boundaries of traditional drawing. They created a setup that could capture images using glass and mirrors, rather than lenses. This unique approach allowed for endless possibilities in terms of placement and composition, making it an ideal tool for artists looking to experiment with new techniques.

The original Optics device was also limited by its design, which made it difficult to draw objects too close. "If you were too close, the Optics started to fail," explained one user. This limitation actually ended up being a blessing in disguise, as it forced artists to think creatively about their placement and composition. By experimenting with different distances and angles, artists could create stunning images that seemed almost magical.

**The Limitations of Conventional Drawing**

Conventional drawing tools like pencils or charcoal have limitations when it comes to capturing complex scenes or objects. The Optics device, on the other hand, can capture images with remarkable clarity and precision, making it an ideal tool for portrait, still life, and landscape artists. "You don't have to be a great artist to use this," said one user. "It's more about setting up your scene and getting comfortable with drawing at a distance."

One of the most interesting aspects of the Optics device is its ability to compensate for different lighting scenarios. By adjusting the placement of the mirrors or using special shading tools, artists can control the amount of light that enters the device, ensuring that their image remains clear and vibrant. "It's like having a neutral density filter," explained one user.

**The Power of Control**

One of the most exciting features of the Neolucid XL is its ability to control lighting and color. By using different types of paper or adjusting the placement of lights, artists can create stunning highlights and shadows that add depth and dimension to their images. "You can use this to make your subject stand out," said one user.

**Experimenting with Light**

The Neolucid XL also allows artists to experiment with light in ways that were previously impossible. By adjusting the lighting in the studio, artists can create dramatic effects that enhance their image. "It's like having a mini studio lights system," exclaimed one user.

In conclusion, the Neolucid XL is more than just a drawing tool – it's an innovative device that allows artists to push the boundaries of creativity and experimentation. With its unique optical design and adjustable lighting capabilities, this device is poised to revolutionize the world of art and inspire a new generation of creatives.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody it's Norm from testate and it's the week of maker Fair which means it's a great time for us to meet some incredible makers who have run Kickstarter projects and are showcasing their projects now this is Pablo Garcia you're in town from Chicago where you're the professor of the school of-the-art Institute of Chicago right that's right that's right it's a little bit of a mouthful it is it is but that's the title that's your your your focus is on art and history of art yes uh my my real interest is kind of this blend of the history of Art and history of technology and where those two things kind of coincide I think we think of like technology as like recent events but there's been a great history and tradition of Art and Technology kind of coming together to kind of Advance art history in ways that we couldn't even have imagined I'm getting chills because that's exactly what we're about right right the intersection of art technology these are not separate things they are totally intertwined and a great way to Showcase that is this product that you launched on Kickstarter a couple years ago called the neol Luci that's right um so for people who may not know what a Luca is a camera Luca is what is that device so camera Luci or Luci um is a 19th century Optical drawing Aid and what it was was a prism on an adjustable stand that when you look into it you were able to see that your subject in front of you ghosted over your page which meant that you can also see your hand so what was happening is that the scene was now on your page and you can trace directly from real life and this was something that is uh kind of evolved from a variety of different tools like a camera obscura which most people are more familiar with kind of the dark box with a projected image but mirrors and lenses and and pin holes and prisms have all been part of these ways to get an image onto your page to draw more realistically and more accurately um and the Camala was was just an early 19th century so how did people use it and when did it first pop up was it a consumer device was it an art artist tool uh you have several devices here that you've brought that seem to be like from that era yes so um the original one was unlike the camera obscure which is kind of like an ancient knowledge about just oh pinhole creates its effect this has uh has an actual just original beginning like William Hyde wallon who was a chemist Scottish chemist in 1807 uh designed a camera lucida um and he named it too kind of a play on the name camera obscura that instead of a dark room right camera this is a light room um and what it is is just kind of a small prism and that prism is basically a beam splitter so when you look down at the edge of the prism part of your vision goes to the page part of the vision kind of bounces twice inside the prism and looks out and you kind your eye your brain kind of puts the two together and because the image is bouncing twice in there it's not backwards or upside down yeah part of it makes me think of like dslrs camera technology the prism inside that flips that let you see what lens is seeing and also maybe the reverse way of like how an old school classroom projector works except as opposed to projecting image the image is coming to you on the paper and that's similar effect and what he did when he invented it I'm I'm not 100% clear like what his total goal was but what happened was very quickly artists remember you know an artist is a professional maker right so they want to get commissions they want to do work better faster and so a tool like this helped them very quickly kind of outline beautiful drawings but also scientists if you were into Natural Sciences or archaeology right so um if you were going on a on an expedition and examining the ruins of whatever you would want to draw accurately this kind of scene to bring it back because remember this is in the days before photography was invented right so imagine when you look at like the tonomy of plants or something and you see these beautiful sketchbooks a lot of that's directly from the eye but if there's a tool like this which you can put in your Expedition bag that you can set up and clamp on a sck or you can get a really great representation drawn on the page exactly and without photography I mean put yourself in the mindset of the days before photography how do you draw more accurately how do you convince someone that this is an accurate rendering of what you discovered or what you're studying or what you're seeing in real life um in fact uh one example is when otoban was reducing the elephant folio birds in America to a smaller consumer grade version he had his son use one of these tools to actually make reproduction Miniatures of his drawings so you can also use it as a copy stand photo copier right and so the tool is very versatile for a lot of different uses and even after photography was invented and took hold the tool evolved into something that was able to be used for um engraving and other kind of copying products uh services that that professional engravers would do or you know days before photography was easily disseminated but that's not to say there's no Artistry in the drawing even though you can see the image and you're tracing with with light uh you're also you still have to understand relationships between these shapes and forms and you're still using your hand holding a writing tool and drawing tool it's just a different tool right and this is part of the controversy that part of what inspired my interest in the tools in cam luucas was that when David Hackney produced the book called secret knowledge in which he kind of talked a lot about the way that ancient Masters probably use Optical tools whether it's was camera obscura or mirrors and there's a whole bunch of versions of that but he mentions specifically the camera Luci and he talks about uh jeus Dominic Ang who has these kind of beautiful pencil portraits from the early 1800s and it was controversial because certain people just want to believe that these things are naturally just super super exactly but the reality is the tools are still hard to use they just they they guide the hand but it's still actually very challenging to use yeah we' like to think of tools as you can do you don't need the tool to do everything but the tool expedites the time and allows you to bring other creative forces in to make your art right and what I found also like certain tools allow for the automation of some part of the task that you're doing so that you can focus on the other part so if I'm looking at you to draw you I don't have to like look up and down the image is there so proportion becomes a little easier but I'm still focusing on how I'm drawing you're shading this is the way I'm shading my hand becomes more of my focus not so much trying to do too many things at once oh that's very cool now in addition to one of these original camera lucias uh you said photography came about of obviously over 100 years years ago did we see a decline in the use of these once you know digital photograph even traditional photochemical photography uh became more widely used yeah so so the the history of the cam is actually really funny because in like 1807 it's invented and becomes a popular tool um quite an expensive tools kind of for the high level hobbyist and we there are some kind of amazing artists that we know who use them scientists as well so Sir John herel the astronomer used to carry one around with him did beautiful drawings as he's traveling the world setting up observatories for king and country and all that kind of thing um the funny story though is that uh part of the decline of the use of this tool or at least the knowledge of this tool had to do with photography and it turns out that Sir John hersel he would go on holiday with his good friends as one did when you were part of the British Gentry um and so one of his friends was very frustrated by the fact that he would look in this prism and see a beautiful image right there on the page and then he would draw and then when he looked away the drawing was kind kind of like uh it didn't live up to it he said I I only wish there was a way to take that image inside there and put it on paper and that friend of Hershel's was Henry Fox talbet who invented photography so his inspiration for photography actually came from using the tool and wishing that the image inside the tool could actually just be fixed on paper permanently so weirdly his experience with this tool led to the decline of the tool because he was able to create this chemical invention that is photography it's the age of photographic reproduction and yeah but but the the weirdly the tool existed in different forms uh pretty consistently since the early 19th century yeah let's put up on here to see so like like this version for example is from around 1900 it's a different prism design um and with all these different little lens attachments uh and this was actually more of an engraving copy tool so uh while photography was popular uh photographic reproduction for magazines and newspapers was still a challenge like photog was not really you know like transferring photographic images in print was hard so what people would do is you would go do your glass plate photo you would bring it back and then a copier would kind of make an engraving out of your photograph uh for reproduction so that's that's tool like this what would the different lenses do so the different lenses actually adjust the focal length so at one of the kind of the number one lens for example we'll do kind of distances and then the number 12 which you can see is kind of this fat by convex lens you can enlarge a postage stamp right so these are like this is more of a kind of uh professional engravers tool but still exactly the same premise and this is the first vintage one that I ever bought and I used to use it for Landscapes and portraits and still lives just like any other one um and then you still have the interest of it into the 20th century um this is one of my favorite ones this is the 1954 magic Art reproducer um and you can see the box it says you know draw the first day no lessons no Talent right and it's got the young man kind of drawing the beautiful like swimsuit model right um and this was sold in like Pulp magazines as an inexpensive toy the back of a Boys Life magazine or something exactly and you would find it next to like the X-ray glasses and those kind of silly things but as you can see it's a really simple it's just an angled piece of glass and a mirror in the back and when you look down it does the same thing really poor image quality compared to the prism of the original design but at what was around $1.98 in the a bargain right um but of course it's aimed kind of at a kind of commercial desire to kind of like oh I can do a cool trick or something like that and then 50 years later right you decided to take on this concept of the Luci and make the neol lucido which was your first Kickstarter project it's the one mounted here um and talk about the development of this cuz the the concepts are well understood but there's still a lot in the product design and the optical systems the present designs you know you didn't come from a manufacturing background I assume yeah I mean I'm I'm trained as a designer an architect and an artist now um and this came about because of David Hackney again so the book was this kind of inspirational moment that uh some colleagues of mine and I kind of in the design art world were just talking about in an educational background boy this is an amazing piece of research because it did a lot of firsthand experimenting like hne would set up drawing experiments much as like the film Tim's verier in which you see someone go through these extraordinary steps of recreating an a dead piece of technology um and so uh a fellow artist goolan Levan and I were having this conversation and I said oh here's some of my camera Lucid is and we had this conversation about wouldn't this be great if our students could kind of see this stuff firsthand but of course you know these beautifully crafted uh brass objects are hundreds of dollars on eBay and they're pretty much obsolete so we have the problem of people hadn't heard of it and if you had acquiring one was just way out of range for most people and we said well what is the technology and you know in the end it's this little tiny prism right and this is our manufacturer version um and all it is is just I just measured off of some of the old ones and kind of worked with the factory to kind of test some out it's a fairly simple technology but what we did was instead of all of these kind of insane Parts which make this a very expensive difficult tool um we just use kind of a goose neck and an anodized aluminum cnced head put the prism gently in there and a little clamp and it makes it a much easier tool to acquire um and what we did was we said well this is going to be about like $15,000 to raise the money to do the minimum order uh and we like well are there enough art history and Tech History nerds out there um yes and the funny thing was um it took off very quickly and we had over 11,000 backers because I think it inspired a lot of interest in yeah I want to draw I love to draw this sounds like a way to get into drawing yeah um and that was a big surprise to us but a really like fantastic moment to kind of talk about art history technology history but also what it is to kind of take pencil to paper and and as as professors the idea that more people would be inspired to try something new that was a real great moment yeah and connects artists aspiring artists students with these the same principles and practices as artist several hundred years ago and also works as a real skill building tool absolutely yeah I mean it's a functional tool it's not just a kind of science demo um it works just as the original ones would have worked in fact we argue that because these are made with Modern Glass and modern mirror modern technology they're actually sharper and cleaner and better um most of these older ones have like microabrasions after a 100 years of use that ours is actually brighter better version than what you get for a fraction of the price well a couple years later now since you're new lucida you are launching a new Kickstarter I believe it's going on right now the XL version we have it off camera let's bring it on and take a look at that this is the ne lucida XL uh I can tell actually looks more like the old vintage tool than uh your first version so what happened was because we were aiming at kind of authenticity of history with the original um a lot of people were interested in it as a drawing tool but of course our thesis was well look it's actually not cheating cuz it's actually hard to use and so many people reacted saying I got the new lucida looks great it's hard to use and we said well yeah we know I mean that's kind of part of the challenge but I found that with so many people really inspired to draw I thought well is there a way to do something that could make it a little bit easier and there is the history of it right so we have like the magic Art reproducer is glass and mirror um and I also have this other vintage piece from 1840 also glass and mirror but made with kind of the brass beauty of the kind of 19th century technology so there is historical precedent for a different Optical design that instead of a instead of a prism it has a piece of angled glass which is partially silvered and then a mirror in the back and so when you look down into it you know I don't know if it helps to see this but um your vision instead of being split by a prism part of vision just looks straight through the glass part of it bounces off the glass bounces off the mirror and sees the subject and so the image quality is a little bit different but it's exactly the same premise and the beauty of it is you're not looking in fussing in this tiny prism you just look in the hole and the image is there um and the big test was that I have two young daughters and when I made the first prototype my oldest daughter was seven and she could never use the ne Lucio the original because it's just too difficult and she looked right inside there and she said oh wow there it is I see it and she was like drawing her teddy bear yeah so I think it's um it's a kind of companion piece a historical companion piece to the original CU it's a different Optical design same contemporary design of of the Nea um and offers a very different drawing experience but the same premise you can draw you can trace directly from real life now with this particular configuration and I know this is your prototype is there like the parameters are kind of locked in for the best distance the size of objects what are those that you that you targeted so one of the things actually with the prism version is that if objects were too close the Optics started to fail with this one because it is just Glass and Mirror it's not lens so there's no focal length really so you can draw anything at any distance effectively um the weird thing is actually it's it the the size of your drawing and the scale of your object have to do with placement so if I were to draw a u i can kind of set it up you know sit you down on a stool look down on my page and I say you know what this drawing is a little small well I just need to raise it up and it would make the image look a little bigger or distance from the C to page right uh or if I want more detail I could just move it closer to you right and so there's no kind of camera focal length in which like there's a kind of minimum focal distance of a camera lens this doesn't have that um and with the original we even showed on our website like a hack where you could take like magnifying glass and some binder clips and like stick it in front if you wanted to mess with that um so there's there's very little limit in fact the only limit to drawing with this we joke is like it's the length of your arm because you can always clamp this to like a tripod or a shelf and draw much farther um and I even have this like novelty pencil that's this long and I show people like you can technically draw very large it's just you have to get comfortable with like drawing at that distance so you can kind of focus or at least compose on your page based on where you place the object so it's definitely not a kind of quick sketching tool it's more like setting it up portrait still life landscape and then you're ready to draw did you have to also experiment with how the clarity of the image how much you want to see the image versus your page um how much that diffuses color what lighting environments you have like what are those Optical optimal scenarios yeah so the the beauty of the original prism design was that it managed to compensate for different lighting scenarios really really well like if your if the scene was very bright and the page was a little dim it would still work because your eye was kind of doing some of the work in this case because you're looking through the glass lighting differences can make a differ difference and so um optimally lighting is just kind of General an ambient even if it's something's too bright I mean think like a camera right if you're photographing you with a bright window behind there's going to be exposure issues similar thing here but um unlike the original neoca what we've done is we've also added this uh Shader um and it's stored in the back and essentially uh if you if you look down you say oh it you know it's the image is really faint here I can take the Shader out place it underneath and it Shades the page so it kind of comes a bit of like a neutral density filter to compensate if it's the opposite and like the scene is too bright um you can place it in front so you can basically kind of do at least one uh it's not truly one stop but if you a photographer treat it like oh I can make a stop Difference by by altering the lighting of each piece um it's kind of a necessary uh component to the piece because the sil The partially mirrored glass does can can quickly kind of make the image disappear depending on your page um the other nice thing is that you can control the lighting of the scene right so you can turn on a light to kind of illuminate your subject more also you can use different color paper so if the paper is white it might brightly be too bright if you use buff tan or gray paper which a lot of artists like to do so you can do highlights you can do that as well so there's a few different ways to control lighting um with the uh elements here but also with the control of the environment awesome well that's great I love that it's taking the original idea you didn't just do one and done you it's taken to a whole new level it's because of the feedback because the first Kickstarter was so successful and people said they wanted to use this to actually learn the draw yeah uh well I'm not a great artist I I'm terrible drawing that's fine that's perfect I would love to get my hands on and do a demo of this I think we'll grab something from our office to see if I can use the neol Lucid XL and create a portrait of something we have yeah and again one of the things that I really reinforce is like it's not a shortcut to become a great artist but it may just make you a little more confident in drawing or make you a little less frustrated to get started all right well let's get started and give it a try yeahhey everybody it's Norm from testate and it's the week of maker Fair which means it's a great time for us to meet some incredible makers who have run Kickstarter projects and are showcasing their projects now this is Pablo Garcia you're in town from Chicago where you're the professor of the school of-the-art Institute of Chicago right that's right that's right it's a little bit of a mouthful it is it is but that's the title that's your your your focus is on art and history of art yes uh my my real interest is kind of this blend of the history of Art and history of technology and where those two things kind of coincide I think we think of like technology as like recent events but there's been a great history and tradition of Art and Technology kind of coming together to kind of Advance art history in ways that we couldn't even have imagined I'm getting chills because that's exactly what we're about right right the intersection of art technology these are not separate things they are totally intertwined and a great way to Showcase that is this product that you launched on Kickstarter a couple years ago called the neol Luci that's right um so for people who may not know what a Luca is a camera Luca is what is that device so camera Luci or Luci um is a 19th century Optical drawing Aid and what it was was a prism on an adjustable stand that when you look into it you were able to see that your subject in front of you ghosted over your page which meant that you can also see your hand so what was happening is that the scene was now on your page and you can trace directly from real life and this was something that is uh kind of evolved from a variety of different tools like a camera obscura which most people are more familiar with kind of the dark box with a projected image but mirrors and lenses and and pin holes and prisms have all been part of these ways to get an image onto your page to draw more realistically and more accurately um and the Camala was was just an early 19th century so how did people use it and when did it first pop up was it a consumer device was it an art artist tool uh you have several devices here that you've brought that seem to be like from that era yes so um the original one was unlike the camera obscure which is kind of like an ancient knowledge about just oh pinhole creates its effect this has uh has an actual just original beginning like William Hyde wallon who was a chemist Scottish chemist in 1807 uh designed a camera lucida um and he named it too kind of a play on the name camera obscura that instead of a dark room right camera this is a light room um and what it is is just kind of a small prism and that prism is basically a beam splitter so when you look down at the edge of the prism part of your vision goes to the page part of the vision kind of bounces twice inside the prism and looks out and you kind your eye your brain kind of puts the two together and because the image is bouncing twice in there it's not backwards or upside down yeah part of it makes me think of like dslrs camera technology the prism inside that flips that let you see what lens is seeing and also maybe the reverse way of like how an old school classroom projector works except as opposed to projecting image the image is coming to you on the paper and that's similar effect and what he did when he invented it I'm I'm not 100% clear like what his total goal was but what happened was very quickly artists remember you know an artist is a professional maker right so they want to get commissions they want to do work better faster and so a tool like this helped them very quickly kind of outline beautiful drawings but also scientists if you were into Natural Sciences or archaeology right so um if you were going on a on an expedition and examining the ruins of whatever you would want to draw accurately this kind of scene to bring it back because remember this is in the days before photography was invented right so imagine when you look at like the tonomy of plants or something and you see these beautiful sketchbooks a lot of that's directly from the eye but if there's a tool like this which you can put in your Expedition bag that you can set up and clamp on a sck or you can get a really great representation drawn on the page exactly and without photography I mean put yourself in the mindset of the days before photography how do you draw more accurately how do you convince someone that this is an accurate rendering of what you discovered or what you're studying or what you're seeing in real life um in fact uh one example is when otoban was reducing the elephant folio birds in America to a smaller consumer grade version he had his son use one of these tools to actually make reproduction Miniatures of his drawings so you can also use it as a copy stand photo copier right and so the tool is very versatile for a lot of different uses and even after photography was invented and took hold the tool evolved into something that was able to be used for um engraving and other kind of copying products uh services that that professional engravers would do or you know days before photography was easily disseminated but that's not to say there's no Artistry in the drawing even though you can see the image and you're tracing with with light uh you're also you still have to understand relationships between these shapes and forms and you're still using your hand holding a writing tool and drawing tool it's just a different tool right and this is part of the controversy that part of what inspired my interest in the tools in cam luucas was that when David Hackney produced the book called secret knowledge in which he kind of talked a lot about the way that ancient Masters probably use Optical tools whether it's was camera obscura or mirrors and there's a whole bunch of versions of that but he mentions specifically the camera Luci and he talks about uh jeus Dominic Ang who has these kind of beautiful pencil portraits from the early 1800s and it was controversial because certain people just want to believe that these things are naturally just super super exactly but the reality is the tools are still hard to use they just they they guide the hand but it's still actually very challenging to use yeah we' like to think of tools as you can do you don't need the tool to do everything but the tool expedites the time and allows you to bring other creative forces in to make your art right and what I found also like certain tools allow for the automation of some part of the task that you're doing so that you can focus on the other part so if I'm looking at you to draw you I don't have to like look up and down the image is there so proportion becomes a little easier but I'm still focusing on how I'm drawing you're shading this is the way I'm shading my hand becomes more of my focus not so much trying to do too many things at once oh that's very cool now in addition to one of these original camera lucias uh you said photography came about of obviously over 100 years years ago did we see a decline in the use of these once you know digital photograph even traditional photochemical photography uh became more widely used yeah so so the the history of the cam is actually really funny because in like 1807 it's invented and becomes a popular tool um quite an expensive tools kind of for the high level hobbyist and we there are some kind of amazing artists that we know who use them scientists as well so Sir John herel the astronomer used to carry one around with him did beautiful drawings as he's traveling the world setting up observatories for king and country and all that kind of thing um the funny story though is that uh part of the decline of the use of this tool or at least the knowledge of this tool had to do with photography and it turns out that Sir John hersel he would go on holiday with his good friends as one did when you were part of the British Gentry um and so one of his friends was very frustrated by the fact that he would look in this prism and see a beautiful image right there on the page and then he would draw and then when he looked away the drawing was kind kind of like uh it didn't live up to it he said I I only wish there was a way to take that image inside there and put it on paper and that friend of Hershel's was Henry Fox talbet who invented photography so his inspiration for photography actually came from using the tool and wishing that the image inside the tool could actually just be fixed on paper permanently so weirdly his experience with this tool led to the decline of the tool because he was able to create this chemical invention that is photography it's the age of photographic reproduction and yeah but but the the weirdly the tool existed in different forms uh pretty consistently since the early 19th century yeah let's put up on here to see so like like this version for example is from around 1900 it's a different prism design um and with all these different little lens attachments uh and this was actually more of an engraving copy tool so uh while photography was popular uh photographic reproduction for magazines and newspapers was still a challenge like photog was not really you know like transferring photographic images in print was hard so what people would do is you would go do your glass plate photo you would bring it back and then a copier would kind of make an engraving out of your photograph uh for reproduction so that's that's tool like this what would the different lenses do so the different lenses actually adjust the focal length so at one of the kind of the number one lens for example we'll do kind of distances and then the number 12 which you can see is kind of this fat by convex lens you can enlarge a postage stamp right so these are like this is more of a kind of uh professional engravers tool but still exactly the same premise and this is the first vintage one that I ever bought and I used to use it for Landscapes and portraits and still lives just like any other one um and then you still have the interest of it into the 20th century um this is one of my favorite ones this is the 1954 magic Art reproducer um and you can see the box it says you know draw the first day no lessons no Talent right and it's got the young man kind of drawing the beautiful like swimsuit model right um and this was sold in like Pulp magazines as an inexpensive toy the back of a Boys Life magazine or something exactly and you would find it next to like the X-ray glasses and those kind of silly things but as you can see it's a really simple it's just an angled piece of glass and a mirror in the back and when you look down it does the same thing really poor image quality compared to the prism of the original design but at what was around $1.98 in the a bargain right um but of course it's aimed kind of at a kind of commercial desire to kind of like oh I can do a cool trick or something like that and then 50 years later right you decided to take on this concept of the Luci and make the neol lucido which was your first Kickstarter project it's the one mounted here um and talk about the development of this cuz the the concepts are well understood but there's still a lot in the product design and the optical systems the present designs you know you didn't come from a manufacturing background I assume yeah I mean I'm I'm trained as a designer an architect and an artist now um and this came about because of David Hackney again so the book was this kind of inspirational moment that uh some colleagues of mine and I kind of in the design art world were just talking about in an educational background boy this is an amazing piece of research because it did a lot of firsthand experimenting like hne would set up drawing experiments much as like the film Tim's verier in which you see someone go through these extraordinary steps of recreating an a dead piece of technology um and so uh a fellow artist goolan Levan and I were having this conversation and I said oh here's some of my camera Lucid is and we had this conversation about wouldn't this be great if our students could kind of see this stuff firsthand but of course you know these beautifully crafted uh brass objects are hundreds of dollars on eBay and they're pretty much obsolete so we have the problem of people hadn't heard of it and if you had acquiring one was just way out of range for most people and we said well what is the technology and you know in the end it's this little tiny prism right and this is our manufacturer version um and all it is is just I just measured off of some of the old ones and kind of worked with the factory to kind of test some out it's a fairly simple technology but what we did was instead of all of these kind of insane Parts which make this a very expensive difficult tool um we just use kind of a goose neck and an anodized aluminum cnced head put the prism gently in there and a little clamp and it makes it a much easier tool to acquire um and what we did was we said well this is going to be about like $15,000 to raise the money to do the minimum order uh and we like well are there enough art history and Tech History nerds out there um yes and the funny thing was um it took off very quickly and we had over 11,000 backers because I think it inspired a lot of interest in yeah I want to draw I love to draw this sounds like a way to get into drawing yeah um and that was a big surprise to us but a really like fantastic moment to kind of talk about art history technology history but also what it is to kind of take pencil to paper and and as as professors the idea that more people would be inspired to try something new that was a real great moment yeah and connects artists aspiring artists students with these the same principles and practices as artist several hundred years ago and also works as a real skill building tool absolutely yeah I mean it's a functional tool it's not just a kind of science demo um it works just as the original ones would have worked in fact we argue that because these are made with Modern Glass and modern mirror modern technology they're actually sharper and cleaner and better um most of these older ones have like microabrasions after a 100 years of use that ours is actually brighter better version than what you get for a fraction of the price well a couple years later now since you're new lucida you are launching a new Kickstarter I believe it's going on right now the XL version we have it off camera let's bring it on and take a look at that this is the ne lucida XL uh I can tell actually looks more like the old vintage tool than uh your first version so what happened was because we were aiming at kind of authenticity of history with the original um a lot of people were interested in it as a drawing tool but of course our thesis was well look it's actually not cheating cuz it's actually hard to use and so many people reacted saying I got the new lucida looks great it's hard to use and we said well yeah we know I mean that's kind of part of the challenge but I found that with so many people really inspired to draw I thought well is there a way to do something that could make it a little bit easier and there is the history of it right so we have like the magic Art reproducer is glass and mirror um and I also have this other vintage piece from 1840 also glass and mirror but made with kind of the brass beauty of the kind of 19th century technology so there is historical precedent for a different Optical design that instead of a instead of a prism it has a piece of angled glass which is partially silvered and then a mirror in the back and so when you look down into it you know I don't know if it helps to see this but um your vision instead of being split by a prism part of vision just looks straight through the glass part of it bounces off the glass bounces off the mirror and sees the subject and so the image quality is a little bit different but it's exactly the same premise and the beauty of it is you're not looking in fussing in this tiny prism you just look in the hole and the image is there um and the big test was that I have two young daughters and when I made the first prototype my oldest daughter was seven and she could never use the ne Lucio the original because it's just too difficult and she looked right inside there and she said oh wow there it is I see it and she was like drawing her teddy bear yeah so I think it's um it's a kind of companion piece a historical companion piece to the original CU it's a different Optical design same contemporary design of of the Nea um and offers a very different drawing experience but the same premise you can draw you can trace directly from real life now with this particular configuration and I know this is your prototype is there like the parameters are kind of locked in for the best distance the size of objects what are those that you that you targeted so one of the things actually with the prism version is that if objects were too close the Optics started to fail with this one because it is just Glass and Mirror it's not lens so there's no focal length really so you can draw anything at any distance effectively um the weird thing is actually it's it the the size of your drawing and the scale of your object have to do with placement so if I were to draw a u i can kind of set it up you know sit you down on a stool look down on my page and I say you know what this drawing is a little small well I just need to raise it up and it would make the image look a little bigger or distance from the C to page right uh or if I want more detail I could just move it closer to you right and so there's no kind of camera focal length in which like there's a kind of minimum focal distance of a camera lens this doesn't have that um and with the original we even showed on our website like a hack where you could take like magnifying glass and some binder clips and like stick it in front if you wanted to mess with that um so there's there's very little limit in fact the only limit to drawing with this we joke is like it's the length of your arm because you can always clamp this to like a tripod or a shelf and draw much farther um and I even have this like novelty pencil that's this long and I show people like you can technically draw very large it's just you have to get comfortable with like drawing at that distance so you can kind of focus or at least compose on your page based on where you place the object so it's definitely not a kind of quick sketching tool it's more like setting it up portrait still life landscape and then you're ready to draw did you have to also experiment with how the clarity of the image how much you want to see the image versus your page um how much that diffuses color what lighting environments you have like what are those Optical optimal scenarios yeah so the the beauty of the original prism design was that it managed to compensate for different lighting scenarios really really well like if your if the scene was very bright and the page was a little dim it would still work because your eye was kind of doing some of the work in this case because you're looking through the glass lighting differences can make a differ difference and so um optimally lighting is just kind of General an ambient even if it's something's too bright I mean think like a camera right if you're photographing you with a bright window behind there's going to be exposure issues similar thing here but um unlike the original neoca what we've done is we've also added this uh Shader um and it's stored in the back and essentially uh if you if you look down you say oh it you know it's the image is really faint here I can take the Shader out place it underneath and it Shades the page so it kind of comes a bit of like a neutral density filter to compensate if it's the opposite and like the scene is too bright um you can place it in front so you can basically kind of do at least one uh it's not truly one stop but if you a photographer treat it like oh I can make a stop Difference by by altering the lighting of each piece um it's kind of a necessary uh component to the piece because the sil The partially mirrored glass does can can quickly kind of make the image disappear depending on your page um the other nice thing is that you can control the lighting of the scene right so you can turn on a light to kind of illuminate your subject more also you can use different color paper so if the paper is white it might brightly be too bright if you use buff tan or gray paper which a lot of artists like to do so you can do highlights you can do that as well so there's a few different ways to control lighting um with the uh elements here but also with the control of the environment awesome well that's great I love that it's taking the original idea you didn't just do one and done you it's taken to a whole new level it's because of the feedback because the first Kickstarter was so successful and people said they wanted to use this to actually learn the draw yeah uh well I'm not a great artist I I'm terrible drawing that's fine that's perfect I would love to get my hands on and do a demo of this I think we'll grab something from our office to see if I can use the neol Lucid XL and create a portrait of something we have yeah and again one of the things that I really reinforce is like it's not a shortcut to become a great artist but it may just make you a little more confident in drawing or make you a little less frustrated to get started all right well let's get started and give it a try yeah\n"