The book

Much of my attention lately has been taken up with working on my horse color book. It's a project that I've been working on, on and off, for years. I decided last year that it really needed to become a priority, or it was never going to be completed. I set a target of having it ready in time for BreyerFest 2010. It will be the 21st BreyerFest and the 15th annual North American Nationals, and it seems to be shaping as an informal "old timers" reunion. Knowing that my friend Ardith Carlton will be there (with her own book on artist Julie Froelich) has given me a little additional incentive.

The manuscript is still far from finished. Whole passages are rough, and the text is peppered with little side comments about facts that need to be double-checked. (I live in fear that one of them will escape the editors, and the book will be printed with something like "surely this color notation is wrong - check!" somewhere in the text.) It was close enough, however, that I started testing formats and book sizes with the hopes of finding a good fit - and getting a page estimate.

I suspected the book was running a little too long. Unfortunately for me, my suspicions were off. It wasn't running a little too long; it was running way too long. I ended up with an estimate of close to 800 pages, and that was just the text. I was only just starting to work on the illustrations so they were not factored in to the count. Not only is number of people that interested in horse color rather small, there are page limits on perfect binding. So I am mulling over my options. Do I drop the rarer breeds? (Does anyone really care if the Asturcón are sometimes chestnut?) Do I pull out some of the specifics and publish them in a separate appendix? Or do I break the whole project into two or more volumes?

So those are the things I am mulling over, all while I am laughing at myself. This was supposed to be the small book - the "easy" book - that I published before tackling the "real" horse color book. How long could a book on the history of color in the different breeds be? I would write this short one, and then tackle the harder "everything I know about identifying colors and patterns" book later. I should have known that I don't know how to do short and easy projects.



But I have been encouraged by these old printouts I found while going through my old notes. They are from the first horse color seminar I gave. The date in the corner is 2001 - the same year that my youngest son was born. He was five months old when I gave the presentation. Somehow I managed to complete the whole thing, including more than 30 illustrations, in just a few months with a newborn in the house. If I could do that, I should be able to make this book deadline standing on my head. At least, that's what I am telling myself!

And this time around, I have much better tools. I used illustrations when I did the presentation in part out of necessity. It would be too difficult to track down the copyright holders for the photos that I would need to illustrate my points. I also thought that whimsical ink and marker drawings might make the subject matter a little less intimidating. It worked wonderfully.

Except that it was time-consuming. I reused the lineart, as you can see with the stock horse that modeled the pinto patterns, but I had to ink it each time. And the colors were limited. I left out the (then newly discovered) champagne gene because I could not find the right shades of taupe! If only I had known how to make digital images, I could have save myself a lot of effort.

And that is what I am doing with the book. Although it will have photographs, my experience with the presentations taught me that sometimes the most helpful image is a drawing.



For this project, I only have to ink things by hand once. Here is one of the inked line arts that I will be using in the book. There are several different ones that are posed according to what parts I might need to illustrate. This one is for large body pattern illustrations where the face markings are less important. There is one with a dramatic head turn for when I need to show what is going on with the face.



Here the ink drawing has been scanned in and I've started inking it electronically with my fancy new Intuos4 tablet. The original ink lines (now a light gray) are still visible under the darker digital ones. After that has been done, I'll be able to create a template of not only the lines but also the basic shading. That will give me a base that can be used for making multiple illustrations more quickly.

Being such a visual person, and being able to make whatever image I think might clarify the text, probably isn't going to help my page number problem. So I'm setting the book and the drawings aside for a week or two, and returning to the studio. I find that sometimes answers come after I let a problem sit for a bit while I immerse myself in something completely different. Perhaps an inspired solution will come to me while I erase hundreds of little dapples!