Low Calorie Birthday Cake

Today is RantWoman’s birthday.

Happy Birthday to me. In honor of the occasion, RantWoman made some tactile birthday cakes.

 Tactile Birthday cakes?

 
Sure. Make tactile art so one can touch the cake without getting icing everywhere.

RantWoman, could you describe your creative process when trying to create tactile art?



A two-tier cake
with white icing and red and black
patterns in the icing

Sure:

                Start Zoomtext; start browser of choice

Put search string into Google.

Look at images.

                Ack! It’s birthday cake. Does RantWoman REALLY want to eat all that cake?

                Ack! YES! If cake were available, RantWoman would find it easy to eat a lot of it.

                Ack! Forget about actual cake. Just make art.

Try various subsets of the search results.

Save some images that have clear lines and look like the software will be able to work with.





The image as prepared for embossing

Start Tactile View

Load Images into Tactile View.

Adjust size of image to fit the page in either portrait or landscape.

Try various sequences of Black and White, Negative, Line Drawing until the image looks plausible

                Yeah, the software has a whole bunch of other functions.

                Nope, Learning other functions is more visual than RantWoman wants to think about.

Fix the text so there is a braille label

Emboss a test image.

                If the lines are clear and the image recognizable, make another; save the before, after

                If the result is a sheet full of swaths of dots and even holes, just try a different image.

 

There. Is that enough of the basics? See because these days besides limiting cake calories, RantWoman a lot of the time—but definitely not always eats cottage cheese instead of ice cream. And there are other wonders that emerge from RantWoman’s kitchen.

 

RantWoman, isn’t there a lot else to talk about besides food?

 

You mean like all that wisdom that is supposed to be more accessible at every passing birthday?

 Something like that.

 Can we just stick to tactile food art for now?