Artograph Art Projector – Enlarge & Trace Your Animation Drawings

Ships in 1–2 weeks. Ordered for you, then shipped from us.

What it's for: an opaque art projector shines any drawing, photo, or printout onto a wall or a sheet of paper, bigger. You don't need a transparency. Put your drawing under it and trace the projected image. Muralists and sign painters use them. So do animators, and this is the trick that makes it worth owning.

The studio secret: enlarge-and-trace in-betweens

This one was passed down to us by a working animation artist. It's how you animate something growing, zooming toward the camera, or moving in or out of depth without redrawing it from scratch every frame:

1. Tape your paper to the wall and project your key drawing onto it. Trace it.
2. Roll the projector back a few inches. The image gets a little bigger. Tape up a fresh sheet and trace again.
3. Repeat, moving the projector the same distance each time. Every drawing is an in-between that grows in perfect proportion.
4. Line the sheets up on your peg bar and flip them. You've got a smooth zoom or grow cycle, and the drawings stay consistent because they all came from one original.

Tip: mark the floor with tape at each projector position so you can go back and redo a single frame.

No projector? The copy-machine version

Here's the same trick with a copier. Photocopy your drawing, then enlarge each new copy a little more than the last (100%, 103%, 106%...). Trace each copy onto punched animation paper on your light pad, or clean them up directly. It's slower and you're limited to the copier's sizes, but it works anywhere there's a copy machine.

Which model?

• EZ Tracer: compact, with a 4" x 4" copy area, and it enlarges 2x to 10x. Great for character drawings and cycles.
• LED Tracer: a brighter LED lamp and a larger copy area, so you can work in a lit room and with bigger artwork.

Both also handle backgrounds, layouts, murals, and set painting for stop-motion sets.