[accessibleimage] Re: Women in Paintings Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for your comments about our new book.  We are really pleased with how
it came out, and I would be happy to describe how we made it.

We use a process that was first demonstrated by Dr. John Gill of RNIB in the
late 1980's. Over the years, we have tweaked the process considerably, so
that we have very good control over the results.  Here are the steps:

1.  We get a high resolution scan of the painting.

2.  We import that image into AutoCad.

3.  We trace over the image, converting it from a visual to a tactile
picture. This requires significant simplification and generalization to
promote good reader comprehension.  We assign each drawing entity (line,
point or texture) to a height above the surface of the paper.  The maximum
height we can achieve is .1 inches (2.54 millimeters), and the minimum
height is about .005 inches (0.127 millimeters).

4. We engrave an acrylic plastic plate with the reverse-reading (mirror
image) tactile picture using a Roland MDX-500 CNC milling machine.  This is
basically a robotic router connected to a computer.  The engraving process
is automatic, and takes about an hour for one plate.

5.  We make a right-reading rubber mold by pouring a thick liquid casting
compound that sculptors use onto the plate.  We use a squeegee to make sure
that the liquid fills in all of the grooves and points. We smooth out the
liquid so that it makes a consistently thick layer, about .0625 inches (1.58
millimeters) thick.  Then, we place a piece of fabric as a backing material
on the plate, and let the rubber stuff dry, which takes about 4 hours. Once
it has dried, we drill tiny air holes through the mold material.

6.  Next, we make a print version of the plate in Adobe Illustrator.  This
includes the original scanned image and any titles that we want to appear in
text.  We send the Illustrator file to a print shop, where the image is silk
screen printed onto 7 mil matte vinyl sheets. We use very elastic and
durable inks that are non-toxic.

7. We place the mold on a vacuum thermoform press and, and make as many
copies as we want.   Then, we trim the vinyl sheets down to the size of the
book, and punch holes in each page for a spiral binder. 

9. We assemble the book, which consists of the pictures interleaved with
large print and Braille text pages.  

As you can see, it's a lot steps, and that makes the process pretty
expensive to do, unless you are going to make 1000 copies or more, which is
very rare in this field. We only made 30 copies of the book for the
Metropolitan Museum, which they intend to use in their education program. 

We are doing another one of these for the Jewish Museum here in New York,
and we have some preliminary discussion with the Met about doing another
book, maybe of nude figures this time.  By the way, if you want to see some
pictures that show our process, you can go to
http://www.touchgraphics.com/cad.htm


Happy Holidays to everyone on this great list!

Steven Landau
Touch Graphics, Inc.
New York City
USA
www.touchgraphics.com 


-----Original Message-----
From: Lisa Yayla [mailto:lisa.yayla@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 6:46 AM
To: accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: Women in Paintings Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hi,
Forgot to write that I hope we can hear more about the production
technique used.

Best,
Lisa

accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx skrev 20. desember 2006 kl. 12:42 +0000:
>Hi
>The Metropolitan Museum of Art has produced Women in Painting A Tactile
>Graphic Book Featuring Works of Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by
>Rebecca McGinnis. It has been designed and produced by Touch Graphics Inc.
>The works are beautifully described and illustrated. 
>
>It is a wonderful accomplishment.  Rebecca writes that "a 3-axis
>computerized milling machine was used to engrave acrylic plates with
>three-dimensional images. Then the images were vacuum-thermoformed into
>silk screen-printed vinly pages".  
>
>
>
>http://www.touchgraphics.com/
>http://www.metmuseum.org/
>
>
>
>Best,
>Lisa
>
>Lisa Yayla
>Huseby Kompetansesenter 
>Oslo Norway
>lisa.yayla@xxxxxxxxxx



Lisa Yayla
Huseby Kompetansesenter 
Oslo Norway
lisa.yayla@xxxxxxxxxx

Other related posts: