Selecting the illustrations for Wherever the Road Leads has sent me down memory lane yet again. I plan for the book to have three kinds of illustrations:
• Photos taken by Tom of our travels
• Pen-and-ink drawings I did along the way
• Route maps with small sketches to show where we went
I concentrated on the photos first. Several months ago, I went through all the slides (I’d estimate almost 1,000) Tom and I took over the two years we traveled in the van. It was interesting to see that, in the beginning, we didn’t do much photography. Maybe we were too worried about car troubles during the first several months of our adventure. However, as the time rolled by, Tom took more and more pictures. By the time we got to India, he was adept at using his two lenses, especially the telescopic.
Somehow I was able to narrow the slices down by half. Next I then sent the best 500 slides to Costco to be digitalized and stored on a CD as well as on Google photos. Another pass through the pictures, with my daughter’s help, enabled me to narrow the selection to about 25 I thought could make good book illustrations.
Because of the prohibitive cost of printing the interior with any color, all the photos had to be converted into black and white. My wonderful graphic artist, Cole Waidley, accomplished this easily. He also sharpened their focus as much as possible and I cropped a few of the images to improve their composition. Now we were ready for the next step.
I sent a selection of the best photos to my beta-readers, my editor, and a few friends who have heard segments of the story over many years of friendship. The input I received helped me select the 13 photo illustrations that will appear in Wherever the Road Leads.
Here are a few I thought you might enjoy now. Which is your favorite? Do you think these photos help tell the story?
Tom and me at our wedding. Washing laundry in a river while village children watch.
I loved shopping for spices at the Moroccan Souk. My nephew and niece enjoy smoked eel with me.
Tom and I enjoy a lunch of boiled shrimp in Norway. Main street in Herat, Afghanistan.
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