DIY Lightbox

"DIY" is a very generous term here, considering in the ten years since I made this thing (hey, it's survived multiple intra- and interstate moves) the DIY scene's been pretty heavily gentrified and instagrammed into polished perfection.  But that's just my opinion =p

One hand for the (ancient and gimpy) saw, one for the phone...

I have a lightbox now, and it cost me in total about…$20.  Most of the materials were lying around the house or I had them for other things, but the plexiglass ($5 at Home Depot, find it in the window dept) and the light fixture (12″ fluorescent $14, also Home Depot) I did have to get myself.

Found a likely-looking box and cut off the top few inches of it.  The sloping inside consists of six toilet paper rolls and the longer scraps from the half I cut off, which are wedged in place at the ends with the shorter scraps.  There’s a hole cut in one end for the light, since it’s either battery or AC powered.  Papering was done with a few pages from last year’s Farmer’s Almanac (its paper is a lot like phone book paper, somewhere between newsprint and tissue, and really good for papier-mache, btw), to straighten out the slope and secure the whole thing to the inside of the box, coating it/gluing it down with a mix of 50/50 Elmer’s and water.  Over that went some tinfoil, for reflective purposes.  I may or may not paint over it, but the thing works fine for now.

After that I cut some pieces of dowel to shore up the corners and later provide a stable place to anchor the plexiglass.  I don’t beat the shit out of my paper when I work on it, but better to be safe than have the box collapse on me mid-trace.

2023 update - it still hasn't been painted.

The dowels are secured with duct tape and then papered over, which also holds the tinfoil on.  The plexiglass overhangs it just enough that I can clip paper to it if I want, and the whole thing is almost perfectly lap-sized.  It works well enough for my purposes – those are two pieces of cardstock used in the example, and the sketch on the bottom one is in light pencil.