Promise

Always keep your promises!

This is one of those images that I saw, and something just popped into my head.  I saw the image and all I thought was "Promise Me You'll Never Change me Back!"

I had no idea on how this person go here, who they are talking to, or even what changing back would be.  But I knew that  could make it work.  A lot of the time when I come across an image like this, the story doesn't work out.  The punchline doesn't hit on all cylinders, or the intro goes so far that the punchline is no longer needed, or it no longer works.  And one big problem... I didn't pick this image out for anyone in particular.  It just screamed at me while searching for an image to use in "Fantasies Fulfilled".  I would have used it there, but Martha prefers more amature photos, and this is very professorial.  Normally if an image works, I'll overlook that preference, but I had already overlooked Martha's preference for an amature photo several times, so I really didn't want to use this.

But it still demanded that I work with it.   I considered just making a quick cap for myself, but then I remembered that Dee is next on my list. I know that Dee likes many different things in caps, and doesn't have a lot of 'set in stone' preferences.  So I decided to make this up for her.

Now the original image was very large:

So my first thought was to just use up the extra space.  I knew I wanted to separate the 'promise me....' line from the rest of the story, so I started by putting that line in.  Now I had to actually write something to go into the rest of the white space.

I wrote up the story fairly quickly, but did a lot of on the fly editing.  I wanted to keep it short and sweet (a page out of Dee's own book), so I was constantly letting details go before they got stuck into my head.  I think the story works, and decided to use an all caps font to really separate the person speaking from Dee speaking.

Here is what I came up with:

Even before I got the text in place, I realized that it wouldn't work.  I would be filling up an entire area of empty space, while letting the rest only have 'Promise me..." in it. I went ahead and got the text more or less lined out so I could show what I was thinking.

So instead of using this layout, I went with a more traditional layout. Once I had the image placed on the background, I realized that the only real color to use is in her eyes.  But even that color is really pale.  Then I remember Dee's comment on "Pretty Pink Posies" saying she liked the black layout better.  So I went with that. The problem is that her skin here is so saturated that the black just looked out of place.  Thats when I started playing with the saturation.  I ended up pulling out all of the color, and recoloring her eyes.  The last change was to make the title a dark blue.