Petrafied/Petrified

Dark and Tender?  Well... no... not at the same time. 

So these require a little back story.  A little over a month ago Petra made me a cap.  And not just one cap, but two.  She found an image that told her two different stories.  One of them humiliating, and one of them tender.  Instead of picking which ever she thought would be best, she went ahead and made both, then gave both of them to me.  I vowed that when I made a return cap that I would do something similar... I would find a picture that could tell two totally different stories.

Well I finally found the picture today.  This is actually Gillian Anderson (the redhead from the X-files), in a scene from some movie.  I really loved the fact that you couldn't see her face.  Without her face in it, I can give her all sorts of emotions, and then just explain the guys grin and hand on her head.

Under normal circumstances I would be able to whip out two stories rather easily... but I'm in a funk, and writing just doesn't come naturally.  But I have a big debt, and this is Petra... I try to always deliver something good for Petra.

The first thing I did was cut down the image some.  As much as I hate the long format of the image, I wanted to cut the guys face out of it.  Here is the original:

As you can see this is not a stall in a bathroom... but once cut down I think that it worked better.  And while I really like the purple in the background, I found it took away from the red hair.  So I made it black and white, then brought the color back in her hair.  I also thought his expression was a little.... off.  so I wanted to crop it out, even though it left me with a very long format.

Once I had the basic image, I decided to start writing the darker tale first.  I went though several versions, all based around a girlfriend bringing her cross dressed boyfriend to a club, and then getting drunk and not taking care of him.  You can guess where they all ended up.  But I had to start over about 5 or 6 times before I got the tone right.   And even this final version feels a little flat to me.  But with the way I'm writing, I don't think I could make it better.

So once i had the story, I needed to make a title.  I wanted a title that could work with both a dark and a light tale.  As a place holder I put in Petrafied... but as I was putting it down, I realized that it was really close to the real word, petrified.  So I changed the title and then went about making its shadow.  The shadow is just a copy of the text, rasterized, flipped, distorted, colored, opacity reduced and blurred.

Only when I was done with all those steps, did I realize I had started from a layer that read 'Petrafied' and not 'Petrified' that it was supposed to be a shadow from.  I started to go back in the history so I could fix it, when it hit me.  That would be the title of the other cap... and I could reverse the text again so that it would read 'Petrafied' with a shadow that read 'Petrified'.  I know, I know.. its just a little thing, but I really got a kick out of it.