Special Edition

Those special editions are always worth a little extra!

My intention this morning was to make just a quick hitting simple caption.  Something along the lines of "What Will He See?", or something in my LtSL series.  Just find an image, write up a paragraph or two, do a minimal design and post.  So while several images gave me ideas, I passed them up as I felt they were a longer story.  But when I saw this image... well... it hit several of my buttons before I even got to anything TG related.

I should say that I am a major car buff.  I don't work on them (just not a skill I ever picked up), but I LOVE them.  I have since I was in Junior High School and was waiting impatiently for my drivers license.  My favorite care for the longest time was the Pontiac Firebird Tran Am.  I loved the old versions (think Smokey and the Bandit), and I loved the new versions.  And when they introduced the fourth generation in 1993, I absolutely fell in love.  I knew it wasn't the most powerful, the fastest, the biggest, or the best really in any way.  But its design was spectacular.  It looks both as smooth as silk, and as evil as Satan.

One thing in particular that I loved about it was the special editions.  Sure you could go out and get a standard Pontiac Firebird.  It even came in several trim levels.  But then you could get the Trans Am edition. You could add the WS6 performance package.  And in the latter years you could go all out and get the Firehawk edition.  And even as recent as 2010 people are still making one off conversions of the Camero into a new Firebird.

Anyway... when I saw a pic set of a sexy girl washing a late model Trans Am, I just HAD to cap it.  I found it funny that I had never made the connection between Trans Am and TransGendered or TransFormation, but it seemed obvious.  So I pulled the image into photoshop, cloned out the 'Am' of 'Trans Am' and started writing.  I actually went way further than I thought.   I expected to have a line or two about our heroine purchasing the car, and then about a paragraph of her washing it and realizing that the 'Am' was probably never there to begin with.

And while I didn't include it, in the back of my head I had some kind of 'Christine' fantasy going on.  A cursed car that sucked in owners, and changed them.  Only instead of changing them into murderous teenagers, this would change them into sexy women.  Instead of driving them around to get revenge, this would drive them around to get head.  :)

But with all I wrote, I couldn't just slip this into a basic design.  Too much text.  So I threw it into my standard desgin... but even that had problems.  Tilting the image gave me the space I needed, but I don't like to put my title on the left, and my text on the right.  I don't know why... I see other cap artists do it that way and they look fine, but I never think it looks good.  And with most images I don't have to make that compromise... but because there was text here, I couldn't just switch it around.

Here is a quick and dirty version of what I had in mind:

To me the layout just flows better.  But when I'm basing the cap on the 'Trans' in the photo, I really can't have it be backwards.  Sure, I could probably have copied it out and pasted it back in the right way, but to make it look right would have taken a lot of time.  A lot of time that I didn't want to invest.

So I stayed with the first design.  The one thing I did put some time into was making a 'realistic' classified ad to put into it.  I even looked at various classified ads (including in the real physical local newspaper!) to get it to look right. I even went so far as to find a Photoshop tutorial on making 'torn paper'.

Anyway... for a 'quick' cap this took entirely to long.  And now looking at it, I'm wondering why I didn't just take the extra effort and write more about the car and the transformation itself.   The cap now feels a little to much to be a 'quick' cap, but to little to be a 'real' cap.  Hopefully its a middle ground that will still work on some level.