Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The fun part



I want to thank everyone who wrote over the last few weeks to encourage me to publish the horse color book in its entirety. I am still not sure how that will work from a logistics standpoint - publishing the book in two volumes seems to be the most likely route at the moment - but I have decided that it will contain everything that I know on the subject of breeds and their colors.

I also decided that I needed to make an effort to include more photographs. Even with the planned illustrations, there is just a lot of text. Walls of text. So I've been reaching out to people with photos of unusually colored horses with the hopes of including them. It feels a bit like a scavenger hunt, which has been fun. ("Got a true roan Shire? Check!")

The photo above is one recently added to my "have permission to use" list. It's a particularly striking example of silver dapple in the Highland Pony. My friend Caroline Jones took the shot and agreed to allow me to use it and several other pony pictures for the book. It makes me wish that the body of the book was being published in color, but even in black and white the color on that mare is hard to miss.



It's the color I keep envisioning on Sarah MB's Halflinger mare, maybe because it reminds me of the Miniature mare that Sarah, Joan and I visited during Mayhem one year.

I've also had Highland Ponies on my mind because I'm about to list (at long last!) the second of claybody customs that Sarah and I did, and this next one is a Highland Pony. She's a silver dapple dun gone grey, and like the mare above she's just full of dappley goodness. As soon as the Charlotte weather gives me something other than dreary overcast skies, I will post teaser photos.

3 comments:

Danielle Feldman said...

Maybe a companion CD of the reference pictures would work? The photos could be named according to some index so that they would be easy to lookup when referenced from the text...

mel said...

Is the color image issue due to publication cost?

Lesli Kathman said...

Yes, Mel. At the moment the costs for doing it in color are just too high. And really, the focus of this particular book doesn't really require it since it's not really about identifying colors. What I hope is that when I write *that* book, color printing will be within reach.