MayGoldworthy

[Quote - me a while ago] “There's still one other piece of more obscure equipment that I made a lot of use (during inktober 2018) of and I hope to write a journal about at some point”

Here it is:

Light Box

Recently I obtained a decent light box (I'll talk about how I made it later on) and there's no doubting that it's a surprisingly useful item. Before I had the proper thing I made do with taping drawings to a window, or if it was after dark, balancing a piece of glass on two stacks of books with a desk light underneath (not recommended – the books have a tendency to catch fire)

An example of a time I used a light box is on my inktober #5. I wasn't happy with my first attempt, there was just a few little details I wanted to change, however, I know from the past that if I'd tried to re-draw it completely there would be other things I'd want to change instead. What I did was trace the original, aside from what I'd wanted to change, and was left with a better (if still not perfect) drawing:

Here are some other reasons I've used a light box:

• Viewing negatives/slides/photographic plates

• Making clean copies of technical drawings that have been damaged by oil

• If I want to add something to a drawing but aren't sure how to draw it I practice on a scrap piece of paper and can use the light box to see what it looks like on the actual drawing (done for the bin on inktober #7)

And I'm sure there are plenty of others I've failed to think of.

How I made it

I was lucky enough to find something that was almost a light box already, an emergency exit sign that had failed it's battery test and was scrap (free ):

The first thing I did was rip out all it's existing electrics, the light it had was a fragile florescent tube that wasn't nearly bright enough so I fitted it with an LED bulk head light supplied by a 12V constant current LED driver and made sure the case was earthed. The terminal block is for easy replacement of the cable in the future (if you make this you can retrofit it with any form of bright enough luminaire):

Then I used some powerful solvents to strip the print off the plastic (if you make this you could just get some different plastic):

And finally a huge over the top 30A chrome surrounded panel switch that glows red when it's plugged in (for awesomeness ):

and here's it working with the cover off:

Thanks for reading