As my vision faded out in the early Spring of 2014, I also felt my artistic and creative side fading out with it. Not only would I never be able to animate again, let alone create hyper-visual special effects in video, put illustrations and designs in motion to tell a story, or build, light, shade, and render 3D environments again, all of the basic artistic skills I had taken for granted for years went dormant. I couldn’t break out a sheet of note paper and quickly sketch out an idea or storyboard. I could no longer visually frame a composition from real life and recreate it on paper with conté crayon, charcoal, pens, or with mechanical pencil, my favorite drawing medium coming out of college.
Hours upon hours, days upon days years upon years of skills built up in art classes and on my own time all fading away in a matter of minutes since I could no longer see what I was doing. It was extremely hard letting that part of myself go since it was such a huge part of who I was and where I found the most joy. Having an idea and either sketching it out physically or popping open Photoshop or Illustrator and rendering sketches to fully robust designs and ideas with nothing more than my trusty Wacom tablet was just a part of life, an ongoing past-time for me that was pure passion, allowing me to keep up my honed creative skills every day and night, creative juices always flowing from just walking around and looking at the world, ready to tell the stories I was given by clients, producers, and directors before heading back home to tell my own on my own time.
Years have now passed since my vision exited out of my story, and within those years I’d still try to find those drawing skills again. Writing little notes to my wife, friends, and family, trying to sketch out ideas such as an icing design for a cake, trying to use muscle memory to draw my owl characters to make people laugh, each time losing orientation and ending up with something generally abstract and far away from whatever I was trying to do or convey. The pressure I would use and hand positions for sketching and shading were still there, but I still had no way of telling where I was on the paper in relation to what I had just drawn when adjusting positions or losing my place. My mind would be in overdrive attempting to visualize and spatially reason what my hand was doing with the pen on the paper, and my confidence would be dashed when I’d show someone what I had tried to draw and they wouldn’t get it immediately, and then guide my fingers to show how far off everything was from one another in the drawing.
I would be so sure that it had all gone right, and additional attempts of trying and trying again were getting me nowhere, so all those drawing skills just became something that I used to know and I let the entirety of those memories, skillsets, and experiences fade deep into the recesses of my mind, moving on to new things albeit wistfully. Accessibility, coding, technology, and empathetic design filled in my active pursuits, but they constantly felt like things to do since I needed to do something productive but didn’t spark the same joy and passion as that artistic side of myself. Still, I dove into these pursuits that combined aspects of my previous sighted professional life and forged ahead on a new career path.
First Tactile Drawing
A few years later, I was in the Lighthouse for the Blind Adaptations store in San Francisco and was poking around with what they had on display while I was being rung up for some cane tips. I found a squishy mat lying flat on the counter and was told that it was a drafting surface that supposedly let blind people feel what they were drawing. It sort of felt like a robust but pliant mouse pad or a wrist wrest. The cashier handed me a piece of copy paper and a pen and showed me how to use the mat. I put the paper onto the squishy surface, started pressing into the paper with the pen, and could feel roughly hewn lines being scratched into the paper as I drew the pen around the surface. My muscles were rusty, movements were jerky and unrefined, but I managed to sketch out a rough version of Hooty Jr., my round little owl character from my college days. I was unenthused with how the process felt and was sad that my muscle memory was so distant, and thought the idea was novel but not really for me due to ripping through the paper and the final outcome being so rough. I felt my work, thanked the cashier for their time, bought my tips and moved on. Hooty Jr. is still hanging on the wall of the Adaptations store to this day.
A Chance Meeting at NFB New Orleans
4 years later, I found myself being reintroduced to another version of the same bit of assistive tech in the Marriott Lounge in New Orleans. I was attending NFB 2022 in person and had met up with Chancey Fleet the Assistive Technology Coordinator of the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book library branch of the NYPL and overall powerhouse in the fields of Blindness, Advocacy, and Accessibility, and she was showing me the Sensational Blackboard, yet again something that allowed blind creatives to draw on normal paper with a normal ballpoint pen and create a tactile line so you can feel your work and also raise an embossed line for tactile art on the other side of the paper. She had a notebook-sized one with her, a plastic paddle roughly half the size of an 8.5″x11″ sheet of Letter paper, one side rigid, and the other side made up of a pliant rubbery silicone surface. This was much different to the squishy mat from all those years ago. She turned to a fresh sheet of paper in her notebook, placed the blackboard under the paper, then handed it all to me with a hotel stationary pen and told me to have at it. I was naturally rather skeptical due to that roughly-hewn attempt of Hooty Jr. from the Lighthouse, but I settled the notebook and blackboard in front of myself, placed the tip of the pen on the paper, and made my first stroke.
I went too lightly at first, and didn’t really make much of a tactile mark on the paper. Chancey told me to press harder and to not be afraid of ripping the paper. I pressed harder and pulled the pen across the sheet, and sure enough I felt the tip digging into the soft surface underneath but still moving smoothly across in the direction I was drawing. I finished my line, then felt my work with my fingers. I could now easily feel what I had just drawn, then flipped the paper over to feel the tactile embossed line on the back. The novelty and skepticism started melting away with each line I drew, morphing into genuine curiosity and joy. Wavy lines, zig-zag lines, organic swoops, spirals, and shapes started flowing across the page. Rather than just using one hand to draw, I started feeling the progression of the lines with my left hand as my right hand manipulated the pen, keeping me oriented to what was appearing. I drew a square, a triangle, and Chancey and I passed the notebook back and forth as we figured out more ways to draw more complex shapes. Using my left index finger, I’d point on the page and start my pen tip there, then move my right fingers in a circular motion while keeping my wrist locked and resting on the notebook, circling around back to my fingertip to produce a circle.
I started drawing larger, then felt myself automatically adjust the pen into a crosshatching position so I could add shading and depth to the shapes on the paper. We started messing with block letters and text, writing our names, me scrawling in cursive and block letters. We were completely sucked into the process, page after page being filled up with fun sketches, text, shapes, and finally I drew Hooty Jr. again. No longer a rough draft, but my character come to life again in a well-drawn form, this time in both the visual and tactile realms, allowing us to both feel him and for sighted people to see him and understand what he was. Every circle creating his eyes, tummy, and body in the right places, his little beak open with a smile, his wings flapping on either side of him in exaggerated silliness, his ellipsoidal feet splayed in a light hop, his thin eyebrows raised in excitement. Chancey said “See? Now you can draw again!” and I was just emotionally floored, especially after noticing how the time had just past for us without noticing since we were so engrossed.
As she put her freshly filled notebook away, Chancey also mentioned Scalable Vector Graphics and how those can be used to create digital art. Hand-coding vector graphics absolutely piqued my interest along with getting added to a Blind SVG Study Group online, but I’ll write up that path of the story later.
Ann Cunningham, a sighted stone carver and tactile artist, developed the Sensational Blackboard and also taught art at the Colorado Center of the Blind. She runs a tactile art and drawing workshop for kids and interested folks at NFB every year, and Chancey introduced me to her. Her tactile children’s books were amazing, utilizing paper pressed into carved plaster molds to create intricate details and scenes that were understandable and fun to explore. I thanked her profusely for her creation and we spoke at length about various ways to depict certain artistic concepts such as animation, motion, movement, and various mediums and methods that could be used to fabricate these ideas. We discussed the need for a tactile primer, or a way of getting anyone new to reading and interacting with tactile graphics introduced to the textures and sensations coming from their fingers and increase overall spatial and tactile understanding of what they were feeling. I remember having an Italian picture dictionary illustrated by Richard Scarry growing up called Primo Dizionario, and thought something of that nature would be awesome for tactile learners to have to increase their mental and tactile image gallery. Sighted folks get bombarded with millions of images a day throughout their lives, so they have a lot of data to call on when recounting how something looks or how things relate visually to one another. Blind children get a handful of tactile objects and graphics at best in their formative years, so apart from receiving descriptions of things, holding toys and objects, and a tactile graphic or two, they don’t have nearly as much input as the rest of their peers. So those conversations looped us through tactile graphics creation, educating blind folks on how to read and understand the graphics, how people can create their own graphics and art, and all the ways to produce them.
NFB finished up with my mind swirling at all of the new ways to unlock those stored away artistic skills, swirling with thoughts of creating tactile art and graphics using different methodologies, and unfortunately also swirling with a case of Covid, but I got better. I went home and got cracking on both teaching myself SVG coding and also making a rudimentary sensational blackboard out of a baking silpat and a piece of cardboard so I could get the hang of the drawing techniques before I got my own version of the real thing.
Toronto Train the Trainers
A few months later, Chancey invited me to Toronto for a new artist retreat. A bunch of us were going to hang out in a house together with Ann so she could teach us her tactile drawing curriculum, both for our own education and also as a train the trainers event so we could all teach others these skills in our own right. Apart from Chancey and I, the group consisted of Danielle Montour, Ka Li, Karen Anderson, Minh Ha, and Lauren Race. Ka worked as an Accessibility Analyst for the National Network for Equitable Library Service in Canada, plus built his own graphics for guiding folks through tactile Lego builds. Danielle works at the American Printing House and she and I had connected at NFB as well for the first time in person after having worked together virtually in a few other blind education pursuits not related to art. Karen is the Education Programs Coordinator at NFB, and I had met Minh when she was on a trip out to Oakland a few months prior. Minh works at the AFB and she had worked on finding graphics online and refactoring them into embossable images, plus was active in our SVG study group. Lauren was the only sighted one amongst us in the core group apart from Ann, and she works directly with Chancey on helping to create and manage digital and tactile art assets, was formerly part of the Twitter Accessibility team, plus is an accessibility designer and design educator herself. It was a whole diverse group of various skill levels and it was amazing getting to know them all. Sadly, Ann also caught Covid and wasn’t able to make the trip, but we improvised by having her teach us the entire curriculum over Zoom.
We sat on a big sectional couch, a nice gas fire keeping us warm, gathered around a big central ottoman where we placed a laptop so Ann could see, talk, and interact with us from there. We all had blackboards, reams of copy paper and card stock, all manner of ballpoint pens, and we went through all of the exercises to teach drawing.
Technique, lines, shapes, composition, representing 3D shapes in a 2D picture plane, discovering the point of perception, obscuration, foreground, middle ground, and background, perspective, orthographic drawing, convergence, diminution of size, emotional abstract drawing, differences between abstract, stylized, and realistic renderings, and so much more. It was intense and actually quite emotional as we all had different relationships to the activities. I had to step out a few times out of sheer frustration at not getting my artistic skills to sync up with the new techniques of drawing blind, plus I just missed being able to see what I was doing. Others had issues of being intimidated by comparison of output, plus just the sheer amount of knowledge we were gathering from the curriculum was very cognitively filling and we needed a lot of processing time.
I found myself getting more comfortable with the drawing styles and was starting to get near my original sighted drawing speed. I started drawing figures in different poses, little scenes of landscapes, trees, and during the section of the curriculum where we were to be using shapes to define how to draw our hands, I ended up breaking away from the group and drew my own right hand drawing another hand with a quill pen just to be silly.
We learned that outline was the key to being able to understand a tactile drawing. The more shading or sketchy detail that you add to it only leads to muddled up textures and overall confusion. This is still a concept I am working on today with my own sketches, as when I had vision I tended to have a sketchy style to have more dynamic feeling in my lines, plus added in a lot of visual details to convey depth and realism of whatever I was trying to depict. While this drawing style helped me to get just the right line drawing movement down in these tactile drawings, it inadvertently also meant that all the repeated sketching motions would leave additional tactile trails everywhere, decreasing the understandability of my outlines. I started really paying attention to using my non-dominant hand as a guide for the pen tip, always having all of my fingers contacting my drawing at different points so I could have full orientation to where things were, plus would bump the pen tip into my left index finger as I moved it across the page in order to direct my lines to exactly where I wanted them to go rather than just guessing. This helped me keep parallel lines parallel, and helped keep my organic shapes in proportion plus aided in defining perspective without having everything reduced into the abstract. I loved teaching these techniques to the others and loved learning what they were coming up with that worked for themselves. We had a lot of beautiful skill-sharing moments, especially as different parts of the curriculum clicked for folks.
Overall, Toronto was a massive success, plus we got to check out the North Central York Library branch which had a massive collection of international tactile books. Each book had different methods of tactile representation, including moving objects, using different materials for additional sensory characteristics, such as representing snow with cornstarch wrapped in a field of plastic, so pressing on the pouch on the page both felt like and sounded like crunching footsteps through the snow of a story. We were all abuzz with even more creativity, plus got to show tactile graphics, drawings, Lego builds, and even do guided origami with a large group of folks at the CNIB.
We really had something special here, and now all that was left was to actually put this whole curriculum into practice. This all lead up to the Tactile Drawing Teach-In at Chancey’s library branch in March of 2023.
The NYPL Tactile Drawing Teach-In
Just a year prior to the Teach-In, I had never thought that I’d be drawing again, let alone teaching all of my art skills and knowledge to 40 blind and low-vision folks gathered in the main activity room of a library in New York just a year later! Chancey, Ann, Ka, Danielle, Lauren, and I were all present as the core instructional group, and sadly this time Minh contracted Covid just a day before she was going to travel to New York, and Karen wasn’t able to make it. We adapted and broke all of the projects and activities up into 3 full 8-hour days, starting off getting everyone comfy with the drawing techniques for the Sensational Blackboards, working through shapes, obscuration, drawing outlines of animal figurines, converting 3D shapes to drawn 2D flat objects, perspective, convergence, the picture plane and point of perception, and more for just the first day. Ann led us through most of the exercises as it was her curriculum, and the rest of us in the instructional team chose topics we were most comfortable with to present throughout the day. We all took turns presenting a topic and working through the exercises while the rest of the instructors floated around or stayed at any of the 9 tables set up around the space, repeating instructions, demonstrating hands-on techniques, and providing help wherever needed.
At the end of the day, we broke out into separate sessions to drill down on more advanced techniques or to check out different applications of tactile graphics. Ka led tactile Lego builds, Danielle showed off different methods of creating texture with paper and fabrics plus how to use the coloring pages that we had, Chancey showed off tactile maps, and I led a group on shading techniques and how to depict how light interacts with objects in a drawing. Time certainly flies when you are having fun, and I don’t think I got to everything I wanted to impart but everyone had a fun time asking me questions about my sighted artistic experience and we all worked out ways to describe aspects of art and drawing that were perceivable to everyone.
The second day had a lot more movement and advanced techniques, including having all the tables create their own landscape out of arts and crafts materials then drawing the landscape from their perspective at the table, then having a fun art show where everyone went around to feel the artwork and the landscapes. We had a run-down of the color wheel, plus had crayons for folks to use, each one with a small slip of brailled plastic paper affixed to the end of them denoting the color hue and brightness, and we were able to pass out a variety of Minh’s coloring book pages for folks to work on. I loved both teaching the class directly as a whole for some of the projects, and also loved the hands-on time I got with folks as I floated around the room to help out if people weren’t catching on to the instructions. People were able to feel my hands as I worked on drawing quick little sketches of animals or concepts, following my two-handed drawing techniques and shading/texturizing that I taught in the little advanced drawing breakout session the day prior.
We had exultations of people loving what they were learning all throughout the day, so much joy being shared amongst people who lost their sight later in life and people who have been blind since birth alike. The patrons exclaimed that they were now immediately understanding concepts that had eluded them for years, and how the hands-on nature of the learning and the blackboards really connected what they were trying to express in their minds down to what they were able to create with their hands. It was great going around and feeling what everyone was creating in the moment and just hearing the general excitement around the room. There was a strong sense of camaraderie amongst all the learners, especially as people started understanding the concepts and worked out ways to teach the others around them as the exercises were being run. At the end of each day, Danielle ran the whole group through a debrief where everyone shared their “roses” and “thorns,” or the wins and the struggles of the day, which both helped give us feedback on the way we led the instruction and also provided a good space for the group to process all they had taken in.
This is a skillset for art and creative expression, but also a set of skills for professional uses such as sketching out wireframes and layout ideas, circuit boards, architecture, room arrangement, and so much more, and everyone was getting something fulfilling out of all that we were able to teach in the 3 short days of this event.
The third day was our Digital Day, where everyone took turns going over a variety of ways to fabricate tactile art and graphics. 3D Printers, Swell-form machines, CriCut machines, and embossers were all brought down from Chancey’s Dimensions Lab to the event space and everyone got to feel them and were given a run-down of how they worked. Chancey went over 3D Printers, Swell-form, and embossers along with Tactile Maps. Ann ran the group through the CriCut process. Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, Lauren, and Danielle all spoke about the Astro Access project and how tactile graphics were used to create tactile safety panels fort zero-G flight. Danielle and Lauren spoke about professional methods of creating graphics and how the skills apply in the professional world, Steve Landau from Touch Graphics was there to demo his T3 tablet, Stephanie K from NYU showed off tactile embroidery as yet another style of touchable artistic creation, and then I ran a class on how to code SVGs.
It was a pretty quick crash course on the coding, plus everyone had my SVG study guide to read through and play with, but ultimately my idea was to have everyone draw some basic shapes or sketch out a little idea on some tactile dot paper I had created with SVG code and that Chancey had embossed out for everyone. The dots on the paper signified 50 unit increments across an entire page, and that would aid folks in understanding how to convert their shapes and drawings into the right units in the SVG code. Once they were done sketching, everyone had a chance to use their own computers to try tackling the coding aspect of the exercise. Once they were done, they saved out their files to a flash drive we had floating around and Chancey was able to run their drawings through the Swell-form machine to create high-quality tactile prints of their creations.
A lot of folks ran into coding errors which was a little expected due to how fast we had to run through the syntax of creating the files, but a lot of them got the hang of it by the end and came away from the entire teach-in fully informed about all the ways to make tactile art and graphics, how to draw and flex their new sketchy skills, and ways for them to make their own digital artwork independently. We have a lot of feedback and tweaks, but it was a brilliant and energizing success all around, and I can’t wait to do it again!
Conclusion
So again, it took one chance encounter for me to find the right pathways to get reconnected to my artistic self. I could dust off all those skills, unpack all the muscle memory that came from the hours of life drawing and animation courses, all the hours spent riding around on Muni or Bart sketching passengers, or staring out the windows of my school overlooking Civic Center/UN Plaza in San Francisco and sketching all we could see. Reconnecting with those rendering and shading skills and being able to have ideas flow freely down through my hand and directly onto paper. I even drew a depiction of a bouncing ball for everyone sitting around me at Boadega one evening after a dinner reception, and it was awesome getting people to feel and start to understand persistence of vision and how animation works for sighted folks.
I have felt much less disassociated and much more expressive with that creative joy and passion coming back. I now have my very own embosser and my own Sensational Blackboard, so I can both emboss any of my digital drawings or graphics for work, and have the means to draw and sketch whenever I feel the inkling to do so. I drew my wife Amy sitting cross-legged in a comfy chair, reading a book with our cat curled up behind her, a steaming mug of tea on a table next to her, and a bookcase behind her filled with books of all shapes and sizes. I sketched Chancey intrepidly walking forwards along the Washington DC reflecting pool, her guide dog Ramona surging forward, and embossers, pens, paper, and other tactile graphics tools tucked under Chancey’s free arm. My owl characters from college have come to life again, and I’m cherishing the fact that my skills didn’t disappear entirely along with my vision. They were truly just lying dormant and waiting for new pathways to emerge to let them back out again.
All in all, I am very much indeed drawing again thanks to the nudges, guidance, and direction of Chancey, Ann’s curriculum, and the help and support of everyone else involved with this whole tactile art/drawing movement. I am looking forward to sparking the same passion and joy in others as we present these skills to more people in the future!