As you may already know, I quit my full time office job back in January to do whatever I wanted to do for a year. One of the things I have always wanted to do was to learn the process of making animation. Now it's October, and I have created a few short animations. It is a lot of work. Traditional animation involves drawing hundreds of frames just to have a few minutes of animated film. A light table is essential for drawing these frames. I could buy a nice light tablet for about $50, but I doubt I'll use it often. Most animation is created with computer software now. Doing it the traditional way is just to deepen my understanding of what the animation pioneers went through before there was computer.
What is a light table? It's basically a piece of glass or transparent plastic with light underneath. It's not that hard to put something like that together. I gathered a piece of glass, which was from an old entertainment center that I no longer have. I kept the glass thinking it would come in handy for something. I have several lamps lying around. So, as you can see in the photographs, I saved myself $50 by putting together my own light table. It served the purpose.
Come to think of it, the only thing in the photographs that I had to pay for is the Cartoon Animation book underneath the lamp. It was $0.75 from Goodwill. The laptop was given to me because the previous owner upgraded. The pencil box was a gift I got when I was 10 years old, I think. I did buy some drawing pencils. The two tray tables I use to hold the glass were given to me after my neighbor passed away.
