The Masquerade

And now I've made a mask cap!

Ask and thou shalt receive!  Well o.k. I'm no genie, but I do try to answer questions and challenges as quickly as possible.  Sometimes it takes a day or so like "Appreciation". Sometimes it takes about a week like this and  "Challenge".  Sometimes it takes months like "Damsel in Distress II".  But I always try to get them up.

This 'challenge' was a little different to me as I explained... I don't want people to think this is exactly what I want in a 'mask' caption.  So please understand, this is just a cap I made... not a blueprint for what I want.

That being said I did get into the idea of a mask changing someone.  I wanted to go beyond 'hey I put this mask on and now I'm a woman!', so I thought about what more there could be.  What really caught and kept my attention was a mask that makes the person wearing it into what the person viewing them wants.  I already had the image, so I figured I just needed a place where someone would wear a mask.  Because the mask had a certain style to it, I figured a masquerade ball would be perfect.  That also freed me up from making it part of a real costume... it was just a mask.

I think because I always associate 'masquerade' with "Vampire: The Masquerade" I went with my gut and made the innocent girl want this masked man to be a vampire.  What I really wanted to show was that the mask's powers were more than breast inducing, and that the changes weren't really noticed by its wearer.  He didn't feel fangs come out, nor did he even realize he was biting her.  So later he wouldn't notice his body changing.  That freed me up from describing the actual change, and let it be a complete surprise when he found his new body (specifically his breasts).

I think I had a pretty good story.  And yes, even though I don't mention the hero/heroine's name (nor the person doing this to him/her), I did just have to add 'Caitlyn' in there somewhere.  So I went on to the design phase.  As I said I already had the image... here is the original:

I did my normal 'thin' crop, but I also have been in a more 'mono color' feeling lately, so I reduced the saturation of the image and colored it a light blue.

Now I had a longish story, so I started with a blank canvas of 1300x1000.  I dropped the picture at the bottom, and immediately realized that the 'empty' space at the bottom right would fit the last 'zinger' line perfectly.  But I was going to have a problem, even at this canvas size, to fit all the text in AND a title bar.  So I just plugged the title into the picture itself.  Here is roughly what I had (I say roughly because I didn't save it at this point, and had to 'recreate' what I was looking at):

I didn't see anything 'wrong' with the cap.  I just needed to add something to the background.  Instead of doing some lines, I figured I would follow up on the 'mask' theme.  As none of the images I had were close ups of the women in their masks, I went off to google images to find something appropriate.  One of the first images really REALLY caught my attention:

I think if I had found this image before I found the masked lesbians, I would have made the cap based on this image.  Those eyes... WOW!

Without hesitation I through this into the background, colored it blue, and tried to line it up right.  I wanted the eyes to be immediately visible, so that you would realize there is something more in the background... but it wouldn't line up.  And when I finally got it 'subdued' enough to not detract from the text, you could barely see it at all.  It was just 'something' in the background.

So deleted the layer, figured I would move on to another image.  But before I went back to goggle images I played with the photo.   I honestly had no intent to use it now, but I just wanted to 'play'.  I cropped it down, took all the color out and colored in her eyes.  I normally go for green eyes, so I colored it like that.  On a lark I played with the Hue, and made them red.

Umm... wow.  I was even MORE in love with this image, and I just HAD to use it.  So I threw it up into the corner, and then edited the story to make it a picture of the person doing this to our hero/heroine.  But now I had a good mono colored cap... with a hint of red/pink.  I didn't like the eyes being the only other color so I figured I could tie in the character and the image, by making her words pink too.  And once I had that, it was no problem to make the title match up.

I really liked the new design.  But I still needed a background image.  Being that I had two masks in the cap, I figured one in the background would be overkill, so I went back to the old standard 'interesting lines' background:

It wasn't hard to invert the black and whites, color it blue, and rotate it so that the lines were emanating from behind the masked woman.

I'm not sure this will go down as one of my favorites, but I do like it.