Tales in Sombre Tones started with a book called, funnily enough, Tales in Sombre Tones. It was a collaborative project by author Sean Walter and artist Karen Ruffles of Drawing in Dark. We'll explain more in a minute but the short version is that what started as a book became a tour which became an accessibility project which with a certain inevitability became a whole 'nother business. We currently offer recorded readings of the short stories with BSL interpretation, and a gallery of the artwork on here for you to enjoy now right now, plus some animations and a virtual show. To keep up with news, sign up at the bottom of the page.
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Are you sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin. The original book of deliciously gothic horror stories combined many years of entertaining each other online swapping tales of our house monsters, local folklore and so on. The book has 24 stories, each with a full page charcoal illustration because we wanted to create the kind of story book for adults, that we'd loved when we were pups.
When it came time to go on tour, we first asked ourselves who might come and see the show. That led to a far more interesting question, who wouldn't, and why? Initially we were looking for audiences we could convert, but we quickly realised that we were accidentally excluding a lot of the population, just by the natures of our chosen art forms. Visual art, especially of the highly detailed variety is great if you have awesome eyesight, but what about everyone else? The same went for the written word, so we decided to add audio readings but that begged the question of how do we translate that for the deaf community? This is how our adventures in accessibility began.
For the artwork, we started exploring 3d printing, seeing if we could take those drawings off the wall and turn them into something people could experience by touch. The picture above shows our cover image which is the first we've fully converted, printing in white filament and then hand finishing in different textures to mimic the real world experience. It's a fascinating process and raises some questions we'd never even considered, such as how to make sense for other senses, of something like a cobweb? They look gorgeous but don't feel anything like they look. How do you explain perspective using non visual cues? That is again a whole other discussion, which you can read more about on our 3d art page.
The storytelling part we have addressed by creating videos with voiceover, BSL and captions - we did six chapters initially to get feedback. We have used versions of these live at pop up events and created dual sign language ones for our YouTube channel, using a different setup, to entertain everyone during lockdown. What we have learned is that there's rarely one neat solution, and things are constantly evolving as technology does but that's the best bit. Creativity never stops, we're never really 'done' with anything, we revisit and revise - in the meantime, you can enjoy Sula (pictured) and Sean telling you stories on our readings page.
The biggest discovery for us was how changing one element to make it more accessible changed it for everyone - having tactile art meant that instead of art being something exclusive, a step removed from the viewer, suddenly now there was a version the audience were actively encouraged to play with. We were excited all over again, and folks were telling us they'd be far more likely to come and see a show that included accessible elements because they were frankly more fun. This in turn gave us permission to play, we've created silly animations to accompany the stories, had music composed and we're currently experimenting with how we can create a virtual experience to bring the experience to the most isolated members of our community. You can see that evolve in our first virtual exhibition, pictured above.
We're new, we're learning, but we wanted to take a minute and say a huge thank you to everyone who has joined in so far, this has transformed the way we work already. It's gone from one project to our whole approach to what we create and how we share it.