What Is Camera Lucida?

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni, and I'm going to be talking about a camera lucida. Camera lucida is a drawing aid basically and it is really - it means light room, actually, as opposed to a dark room, and it was really a scientific way that people would use to draw and paint with. And what it would be is a mirror held at a forty-five degree angle pointing and this would cause a reflection, I'm being very - breaking it down to very simple terms. And the artist would use that essentially to sketch and trace what they were trying to reproduce. In a way I think it was kind of like cheating in a way to make an image. Now it's really interesting that some art supply stores still sell these as a drawing aid to use, and if you think about this in terms of modern day, some painters I know still use slide projectors or projecting tools to actually project onto canvas and use an aid to their painting. Now some people consider this cheating, I particularly don't, I think any way that you make something that you like is not cheating, as long as it's your doing it and you're not just completely taking someone else's image. So that is one way a camera lucida is still used today."