Welcome to Scribble Kibble.
Today we’re going to take a look at a piece of art equipment called a light box or light
pad.
This is useful for traditional artists and traditional animators.
This model is a Huion LED Light Pad L4S.
It costs about $40.
The work area is slightly bigger than a typical piece of 8 x 11 printer paper.
Some of these light pads come with a glove and pencils.
Mine is a simpler package.
Open the box and there’s a thank you card, manual, USB power cord, paper clip, and the
light pad itself.
This model is extremely thin and light.
At first I was worried about breaking it, but it’s an acrylic surface instead of glass.
It’s more flexible and stronger than it looks.
It also has non-slip pads on the bottom.
I was surprised that its power source is a USB cable.
You can plug it into your computer, or into your cellphone charger, or into your car.
I’ve seen some people complain about other light boxes saying the length of the power
cable is too short.
This one is not.
It’s six feet long.
Once it’s plugged in, tap the power button once to turn it on or off.
Press and hold the power button without letting go to change brightness.
So: what might you use a light pad for?
Most artists are going to use it to turn sketches into clean line art, to transfer a drawing
to a new type of paper (for example on to watercolor paper), or to trace stuff.
You can also use a light pad for traditional animation.
I’m drawing three key poses of a dragon sneezing to work with later on.
The Huion L4S is bright enough to shine clearly through about five sheets of printer paper.
Any more than that and it gets hard to see.
It’ll shine through cardstock too.
The silver paper clip slides onto any edge of the light pad.
It is a tight fit so you have to use a bit of force to get it on.
The clip is a bit difficult to use because it is so tight, but it will hold papers in
place once you manage to get them under there.
They don’t need to be that far beneath the clip for it to work, and the clip doesn’t
leave any imprints on the paper.
You may not even need the clip because even though the surface of the light pad is smooth,
it is slip-resistant.
The piece of paper directly touching the pad won’t slide around.
Tracing an image is really easy with one of these.
You can make clean line art out of a messy sketch quickly.
Turn the light box off once you don’t need the sketch any more.
There.
Clean line art with no pencil lines or sketch marks.
For animation, you definitely want to use the clip.
Stack two of your keyframes together and adjust the brightness so you can see both.
If the light is too bright you won’t be able to see your top drawing.
Draw the in between pose.
I don’t really have any issues at all with this light pad.
There are no cons.
It’s just a simple piece of equipment that works really well when you need to trace stuff.
Or, y’know, draw a lot of traditional animation frames.
I’m going to make another in between pose leading to the top of the inhale.
The nice thing about the light pad is I can see motion arcs - for instance the arc the
nose follows - by stacking keyframes on top of each other.
If drawings have a lot of details it can be hard to see clearly through multiple papers,
so it’s nice to be able to turn the light off and draw details more accurately by memory.
The light pad is especially useful for frames that are close together.
I want to draw an open mouth pose that is only slightly different from the original
drawing.
Being able to see the first picture lets me make sure the head is in the right position
on the page.
Same thing with the sneeze: I need three drawings that are fairly identical.
For the most part I can quickly trace what is already there, even keeping the sketchy
look by copying rough lines from the image underneath.
Now if you wanted a clean animation, all you would need to do is use the lightbox to create
final line art of each image the same way I did for the forward-facing dragon earlier.
It’d be time consuming, but that’s traditional animation.
I like the gritty sketchiness, so let’s scan all of this in and see what happens.
By the way even after an hour the light pad did not get hot, since it uses LED light.
My hand didn’t get sweaty and stick to the surface.
So my favorite thing about this light pad is its lightweight portability, its non-slip
surface, and the fact it doesn’t get hot.
Oh yeah, and because it’s LED light it’ll last forever.
You could leave it on all day and night for five years and it’d still work.
That is the Huion Light Pad L4S.
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See you next time!