When asked what super power they'd choose, most people probably would pick flight or invisibility. Roy Livingston wants X-ray vision. It just seems so much cooler to him. “I think being able to see through things and how they work is incredible,” he says.

Until that happens, Livingston satiates his curiosity taking X-rays of vintage ray guns and toy robots, as well as more pedestrian things like alarm clocks, transistor radios, and cameras. Seeing them from the inside out provides the artist with a nostalgic, child-like thrill. “Each time I process an X-ray image, it’s like opening a present on Christmas,” he says. “Something always surprises me.”

Creating these retro-futuristic X-rays isn’t so different than what happens at the hospital. Livingston places the object in a radiography machine, and electromagnetic waves passing through it imprint the "skeleton" on a sheet of special 8x10 film. Objects made of plastic and metal get two passes in the machine—one print for the plastic details, a second to pick up the outline of the metal—with different exposure times. After developing the film and scanning the image, Livingston combined them in Photoshop.

That's the easy part.

Livingston spends hours—sometimes days—digitally cleaning up the images and adding intricate layers of color that make every spring, coil, and gear pop. The candy hues guide the eye through each object's mechanism as they morph from red to orange to purple to blue. "I like how the colors play off of each other and how they emphasize the various parts," he says.

Livingston's use of color distinguish his X-rays from the work of people like Brendan Fitzpatrick and Nick Veasy. And he admits he often gets carried away, creating multiple variations of each object. "I was once working on a robot, fell down a rabbit hole, and when I came out realized I had created over 100 color variations," he says. "Now most of my files are over 10 gigs and my hard drives are filling up really fast."

It's all for the joy, he says, of bringing these objects to life and sharing them with viewers. He still has a storehouse of wonderful items he'd like to X-ray. “I have a bunch of tube radios I want to shoot, some other antique cameras and vintage tools, and a Valentine typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass,” he says. “I’m really interested to see what that will look like.”