“I became interested in how to create these tactile tools for students experiencing vision impairment so that they were able to interact with the same artworks that their sighted peers would be able to see, but just using touch instead,” Levesque explains.
After researching programs and tactical tools for inspiration, and coming up with very little—if anything—that could be applied to the challenge of creating tactical tools to represent visual masterpieces, Levesque got to work making her own.
“Using our fabrication lab here at the school, I was able to use these new tools (which I had never used before) to create a basis for my project,” Levesque continues. I chose “The Great Wave” by Hokusai, which I thought would translate well to touch and would be reasonable to outline.
In the spirit of great intellectual generosity that the very best teachers all seem to exhibit, Levesque is eager to share how she brought her Exceptionalities course project to life. First, with some magic in ProCreate to break down the outlines and remove any excess visual clutter that might confuse the final piece. Levesque landed on four layers that would rest on a flat background.
Using Adobe Illustrator, “I was able to line, trace all of my already existing line work, expand those lines into paths, and then adjust the size of the lines and where the actual images for the cutouts were going to cut and then send it to the laser printer,” she continued. The result was a tactical prototype that could contextualize historically important artworks for visually-impaired communities.