Anything to Help

Don't ever offer to help a bride in need!

This was a return cap for Robyn over at the Haven.  She included me on her project called 31-31, where she will be making a cap a day for 31 days.  I've always been jealous of those projects, but with my speed, it would be titled 31-356.  But in honor of her including me I figured I would make her a cap in a single day.  I knew I wouldn't be able to get too creative with the design, but I could stretch my last layout a bit.

Now Robyn made me a a wedding cap, so I was immediately in that mindset. When I looked over her preferences, she really had a wide variety.  For some reason though 'being tricked' caught my eye.  I figured someone being tricked into taking the place of a bride.

I should mention that Robyn wants R or lower ratings...she doesn't even want nudity... so I was looking for a 'clean' bride image.  The first one I found was this:

It's nice... and I even caught a glimpse of dialog.... 'Oh you are looking lovely Robyn'.  But for it to be a bride I needed the headpiece in it.  And to explain the finger, I needed the majority of the hand... so it would need to be a 'wide' image.  So while I liked it, I didn't want to use it for this.  I searched again and found the image that is in the cap. I would love to show you the original, but sadly I closed the image search window with it, and did so much futzing with it in photoshop that I no longer have it.

It was a color image though.  I figured it would work, but she didn't look like a bride to me now.... she looked like a bride's maid.  So I went with that.  I was going to use the basic design that I used in "Cum Diet" so I didn't want a long story, but I realized that I had a lot of room to make the text smaller.  Smaller text means that it can be a longer story.

Obviously it is still far shorter than a lot of my work.  But I think I still left quite a bit of story in there, and gave enough to make it enjoyable.  I did focus a little more on the story, as this wasn't just an experiment... it was an actual return.

Once I had the story written, I moved in for design.  Just like in 'cum diet', I reduced the size of the image, giving it a border.  But while I thought about what to use as a border, I rememberd watching some television. Have you ever noticed on some HD television channels, that when they have a standard def video, they blur out the edges and stretch it?  Well I thought that might work here.

So I kept a large copy of the image and left it in the background.  Then I went into Photoshop and gave it a blur.  Instead of my favorite 'Gaussian' blur, I used a 'Radial' blur.  That gives it a 'zoomed in' effect that I like.  I futzed with the color, and finally realized it had a nice elegance in black and white.  But I did color her eyes, to help draw you in.  With the primary image in black and white, I couldn't leave the border as color... it just distracted to much.  So I followed the eye color I used and gave the background a green tinge.  I also darkened it down.

The text boxes were easy, if not a little tedious.  Just create a square path, color it in, and use the same path to put the text in.  Now that puts the text right on the edge of the 'box' so I have to shrink the text down just a a smidge.  Once thats done, I can copy the box and text, and use the same formula for my next text box.

Originally I placed the boxes in the upper right and left corner. While it was balanced left and right, it was very top and bottom heavy.  It really left the image seeming less significant.  So I split the top box, and moved the one down.

Voila!  Nothing special, but it is a nice variation on a new design.  I think this design may be variable enough to go into the standard bag of tricks!