I had the absolute privilege of designing a book cover for my grandpa’s autobiography this spring. He turned 104 in July and he’s been working on his autobiography for a few years with some help from his eldest daughter and a few of us grandkids.
My grandpa, Kenneth, was born in Missouri in 1920. He grew up during the Great Depression and served in the 106th infantry division in WWII where he played with the USO band. He met my grandma by chance at a USO dance. She also served and was a nurse. They were married for over 75 years until she passed away at 102 years old. They raised 4 kids together. And when I say together, I really mean it. My grandpa was more hands-on as a dad than so many men from his generation and I know it made an impression on the kind of father my dad was/is. I’d like to think it even influenced what kind of dad my husband has been to our kids.
With his heavy background in music, my grandpa taught music, band, orchestra, and more in Kansas public schools for decades and was inducted into the Kansas Teachers Hall of Fame in the 1980s.
One of the tasks I was more than happy to help with was editing and cleaning up the photos from my grandpa’s life; photos of varying ages and conditions. We knew that any photos printed in the book would be in black and white, so I was able to clean up quite a few photos and converted any color images to grayscale. This is definitely NOT a specialty of mine, but there are a few I’m quite proud of.
Correcting photos with silver oxidation was a new one for me. Many thanks to YouTube for a few different techniques.
My grandpa is the kid on the left with his brother and his dad, my great-grandpa.
My grandparents in the 1940s.
Top left: my grandma with my Aunt Sue and my dad. Top right: my grandparents with their 4 kids for some kind of “family of the year” photo shoot. Bottom left: my grandparents when they got married. Bottom right: my grandparents in Bali in the 1980s.
For the book cover, my cousin Chris and I had a handful of photos of my grandparents together that we decided between. We agreed that this one worked best for the cover. I love how they aren’t looking at the viewer and it feels like an intimate moment between them. I love the look in their eyes and how my grandma is messing with his jacket button. It’s a perfect pose that shows me how in love they were without looking like it was posed. Honestly, I don’t know if it was a posed photo, it may not have been.
For the cover design, I wanted to isolate them from the background, but I didn’t want the background to be empty either. After cleaning up as much of the dust and spots and noise in the scanned image as I could, I played with some different blurring effects and colors. In the end I’m really happy with how it turned out.
My cousin Chris, wrote the blurb for the back and we were able to get it published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.
My grandpa’s book is available for purchase on Amazon if you want to order one. CLICK HERE to buy through my affiliate link.
