Lucigraph ~~ Lacey/Lazy Lucy?

[DanSchon8]

I would like to just say that there is no digital equivalent of the Lucy, theoretically speaking. Say I have tiny drawings, thumbnails, like my professors taught us. I want to make it larger for my rough, but scanning, printing just isnt the same. The lines are then stairstepped even at high res because my drawing is so small. Maybe with a very expensive scanner, possibly but still when you when you trace that, your laying paper on paper and then drawing. That effects the pencils tip. On a lucy, its paper on glass allowing your very sharp pencils to be effective. Even then to take that larger, trace and transfer is a disaster for as well for finer subtler shapes, even at the mechanical stage and will degrade the shapes, maybe its negligible to some but I may disagree. You could take a 1"x1" drawing to a giant painting without compromising these perfect lines you had on that thumbnail. Projectors distorts and you have to stand. Lucy - you pull up seat, with a fresh peice of paper taped on the giant smooth glass, big bright light beind it. Scaling your art to the size that you want just so perfectly, back and forth you can see how it works on the page much more than electonically mocking it up. I had one in my community college and miss it function.

[Jim Jones]

For many decades I have used slide projectors and photo enlargers to project images onto appropriate paper for making accurate drawings.

[Pieter]

I used a Lucy (short for Lucigraph I think) for many years as a graphic designer. Mainly to trace photographs to use as FPO in paste-ups instead of more expensive stats. Also, to trace letters from type sample books for tight comps. Illustrators would use them too, to enlarge sketches or photos to size for the final art. Much faster than a projector and able to handle large originals. Gone the way of the Dodo.

A lot of graphic design lingo, I'm sorry: FPO: For Position Only, an image to let the printer know what size and cropping for a supplied original piece of art or a photo. Stat: photostat, usually a (more lingo) PMT or Photo Mechanical Transfer, sometimes a print from a litho negative. Comp: comprehensive layout, with large type rendered to simulate the typeface to be used, smaller type just "greeked" in (I can't start explaining everything, sorry) and marker or pastel renderings of photos or art, usually in full color and to the actual size unless it was a poster or a billboard.