Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Pageants

A requested Womanless Beauty Pageant cap, and its dark twin.

I received a 'question' from Alice very early this morning.

Would you consider a cap for a Womanless Pageant, my personal favorite then? 

Instead of making this a standard 'question' post, I decided to go ahead and try my hand at a womanless beauty pageant cap.  I've read a few, and admittedly they aren't my cup of tea, but I think the idea has the potential for a lot of variation.

So I started looking at beauty pageant photos.   The first problem that cropped up is that most of the pageant photos that I looked at were of 'girls', and not women.  By now you know that my mind tends to hang out in the gutter so I didn't like the idea of starting with that age group.  I'm also not a fan of age regression to that young (love the man in his 40s heading back to college as a sexy coed though!).  So I looked past these images, but another problem came up.  Most of the obvious pageant photos where the woman was wearing a sash had an obvious name on it.  'Miss New York' or 'Miss Tennessee'.  I could probably write around that, saying that it was the womanless Miss New York, but it didn't feel right.  I could also Photoshop the writing out, but that wold take time, and I wasn't in that kind of mood.

So I ended up finding this image.  From what I can tell its from some sort of movie event.But it looks like a pageant, just without the sashes.  When I started writing, I was a little surprised that my initial reaction was to make Ellis a willing participant. While I was looking at images, I thought it was a great point for a humiliation theme.  But no matter how I tried, I couldn't make that feeling stick.  I couldn't even make the part of Alice dropping her panties to prove her manhood a good squirmy feeling.

But hey... I don't question where the story leads me.  I just follow it.  But after writing the story, and finishing up the design, I wondered.... Could I focus in on the humiliation of I really tried?  So before posting it, I went back to the word document and started writing.  My first impression was to just use the original story as a template, but whenever I made Ellis/Alice happy, I would throw in that she felt embarrassed or humiliated.

It soon became evident to me that that method wouldn't work.  I had other considerations including 'Jenny'.  So around the second paragraph I stopped 'editing' and began re-writing.  And once I opened that bard door, there was just no stopping the humiliation stampede from coming out.


Now when I made the first caption I started with the brown background.  I liked it a lot, but I didn't want to have two caps that looked identical.  So I tried to make this second cap darker... but look at it.  Its pretty dark as is.  So I saved it, and re-opened the first cap, and went to make it 'lighter'.  I didn't like the brown/tan that resulted from my first attempt, so I just colored each portion (the background, the overlaying background image, the text box, the text, and the title) purple.  I liked it, but they were still too similar.  A quick image invert, and sliding the boxes around almost did it.  Changing the shadows to outer glows finished it.

Now I like the darker cap better, but I am a fan of the unwilling.  I think both of the stories work though.  Lemme know which you like better.  And of course if its more than the willing/unwilling difference I would love to hear why.

1 comment:

  1. I like the "bad" one better. But the unwilling theme appeals to me so I think it is mostly that.

    As for style, the "good" one has a nicer color. But I am not too fond of brown. I generally think your caps look good, a lot nicer than many others. Stylish, yet still readable. I think you spend a lot more effort on appearance, and it shows.

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