Hello there!I am brand new to this group, and looking for advise about what type of led light tracing table to choose: I have got a new commission and will definitely need one to save time. Any suggestion?TIA
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Any one will do. As long as it lights up and is large enough to do your job, it’s fine.
In college I just had a piece of acrylic and two short 2x4s between two side tables with a clip-on hardware store light under them. Worked great.
At work now I have two slide viewing tables (and a loupe for looking at color chromes for image repro purposes.) Those are fine for tracing too.
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I bought a used X-Ray viewer off Ebay several years ago. It was likely hanging in a doctor’s office at one time. It has fluorescent tubes instead of LEDs, but it works just fine. Like PrintDriver said, most any light box that’s bright and large enough will do the job. It doesn’t need to be fancy if all you’re using it for is tracing. It might be nice to have an LED box with adjustable brightness, though.
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I made one myself years back when I didn’t have the money for it. Just used a poster frame, a small easle to hold it together and two lights behind it.
I’ve got a real one now though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUEjc28NKGI
The light is very nice. Easy to adjust the brightness.
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Biggest thing for me to consider was the size. I didn’t want a table because it would take up too much space.
I bought an A3 lightbox from a local maker. Since they were making it custom, they were even able to add a switch for me where I wanted it. Being a box, instead of a table is great. When it is not in use, it sits upright on a shelf and if I want, I can tape shapes or letters to it and use it as a lightbox for decorative purposes.
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Hello to all and thank you for welcoming and giving feedbacks. For I am going to do watercolor illustrations, I am going to use A4 and A3 sized heavy sheets of paper, so it will be important that the light can pass through thick paper. I was thinking of buying an A3 sized tracing table so an A3 sheet will not bend over the table if it is A4 sized. How about brands? Huion has one good tracing table but it costs more than a hundred bucks and cannot be charged by USB plug. I checked
the tracing table suggested on Amazon but it is definitely too expensive for me.Any tip? Thank you
When the paper is too thick for a light box, do your tracing on a thinner piece of paper, rub the back of the traced drawing with pencil, lay it on you thick paper and redraw. You will get faint pencil markings as guides. I wouldn’t recommend a pounce for watercolor, but with acrylics using a pounce wheel and charcoal works well too, if the image is large enough.
If you don’t want to mess up your original pencil sketch, photograph it and have it printed on regular paper.
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