Like a glowing Etch-a-Sketch, LumoPad lets you draw with light

LumoPad is one of the more interesting products to appear on Kickstarter. It’s a lightweight portable drawing board that lets users draw using focused beams of light so that their sketches glow in the dark.

While there are a handful of existing drawing boards for use in the dark, LumoPad stands out because of how it works. The device relies on phosphorescence, which involves a material absorbing light and then re-emitting it over a prolonged period. That means that instead of traditional drawing tools like pencils or brushes, you can “draw” on LumoPad using LEDs, lasers, or even regular flashlights. The drawings don’t need to be erased, either — since they just fade on their own after a few minutes.

“I originally discovered the phosphorescent drawing effect when I was in grade school,” creator Nestor Tkachenko told Digital Trends. “Like many kids, I used to be interested in ‘glow in the dark’ things and lasers. Once at night I was pointing a UV laser at random things in my room, and then suddenly saw the laser leave a bright green streak of light on something. I got closer and realized that the laser had drawn on a bag of phosphorus glow powder. I glued a bunch of the powder onto a piece of cardboard and showed my friends this awesome effect when they came over.

“Almost a decade later, I was throwing out some of my old stuff after stumbled across this piece of cardboard, and decided to play around with it. I quickly decided to make a ‘cleaner’ version and try to make the board I’d had so much fun with available to everyone, [so I set out to] accomplish this by putting it on Kickstarter.”

The cheapest campaign pledge asks for just $20, which will net you a standard LumoPad with a UV LED keychain for drawing. If you’re feeling a bit more flush, however, a pledge of $100 or more buys you a huge 20-inch by 30-inch LumoMegaPad, a regular LumoPad, 3 LEDs, and a UV laser to draw from a distance.

After that, it’s time to start sketching.