With several friends and loved ones who have artistic talent, I thought a perfect gift would be a custom-made drawing aid called a Camera Lucida. For those of you not familiar with this completely analog device, it is a relatively simple arrangement of a box with a mirror in the back and a semi-mirrored piece of glass mounted at a 45-degree angle. The box is open on the side facing the subject of the drawing and over the drawing surface, usually a piece of sketch paper taped to a table. The artist looks down through a hole in the top of the box and sees a faint image of the drawing’s subject superimposed on the surface, where it can be traced onto the paper. Once the rough size and shape of the subject of the drawing is complete, the artist can then finish the work with colored pencils, watercolors, or any other medium they choose.

I designed the assembly in SketchUp and 3D printed the components that make up the box-like housing. I found a source for samples of first-surface mirrors and dielectric glass, which is similar to a one-way mirror. With new glass-breaking pliers, which made scoring and breaking small sheets of glass almost foolproof, I cut the mirrors and dielectric glass to the sizes needed for mounting in the 3D-printed housings. I added inexpensive extension arms to easily position the Camera Lucidas over a convenient drawing surface.

Admittedly, these drawing aids take some patience and careful setup to use, but for a device that’s been around for about two hundred years, they’re a nice departure from our digital world!