NeoLucida: The 21st Century Camera Lucida

Product Information

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. He practiced more and more, using his observations and experience as the cornerstone for his growing thesis. Curators and historians bristled at the suggestion that the great masters of western art “cheated” by using optical technologies in making their masterpieces. I bought the NeoLucida Plus, it's a sharp bright image, and allows for accurate drawings from from my monitor, or from real life into a sketch. In the NeoLucida XL, the angled glass is partially silvered, making it highly reflective but also maintaining enough transparency to see your paper.

The camera lucida provided the amateur draughtsman with an accurate way to depict the landscape, culture, and dress of the young America before the invention of photography.

Controversial new evidence shows the Old Masters used such optical aids, raising questions about the purity of art. It uses a precision glass prism to combine a virtual ghost image of your subject and the real view of your hand. In 2017, Pablo launched the completely redesigned NeoLucida XL, supported by 5,229 backers on Kickstarter. The original NEOLUCIDA uses a historical prism design, but these prisms are difficult to use and the images hard to see, making it tough to draw from. Their travels, documented by Catherwood and his camera lucida and printed with fantastic detail, inspired new interest in Mayan culture and expeditions of Central America.

If Ingres used an optical drawing tool—their argument goes—subjects sitting for portraits would have written about it in letters or other ephemera. By aligning the ghost image of the street with the drawing on my table, I was able to confirm that the geometry of the drawing matched the ghost image of the view.Without a ready way to experience the remarkable power of these simple but now-uncommon devices, its understandable how artists and historians might ascribe near-supernatural drawing skills to the artists who used them. It works just like the NeoLucida: Look down into the eyepiece to see a ghost image of your subject on your paper. This double reflection (once at Number 1, then again at Number 2) means your ghost image is both right-side up and correct left-right. These artists and scientists used the camera lucida to make accurate drawings of their world, from animal specimens to undiscovered ruins, in a time when drawing was one of the only ways to communicate visual information. The original NeoLucida was made in 2013 by Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin and supported by 11,406 backers on Kickstarter.