Language Barrier

Speaking in tongues... or with tongues?

Before I get into the cap, I wanted to share something.   This morning while watching some TV and drinking my morning coffee (a habit I picked up when I needed to have my foot 'up' in the morning for a week), I grabbed my tablet and went to check out my blog.  I went to bed shortly after posting "Virtual Holiday" and wanted to see if it had received any comments.  But when I went to caitlynsmasks.blogspot.com I was rewarded with the following:

 OH CRAP!

Of course a million things went through my mind.  Had someone reported me for copyright infringement?  Had Google caught up with my blog from me posting the videos to youtube?  Did I change something and have my blog listed as non adult?

I followed the link and was asked to verify that I was in fact me.  Thankfully after all the recent problems of fellow TG bloggers having their blogs removed, I went ahead and gave Google my phone number.  By doing that months ago, I just needed to log in, put in that number and they sent me a text.  The text had a verification code that I inputted into the site and voila... the blog returned.

It looks like I either caught it at the right time, or it recognized me and pulled the blog down when I tried to view it as I have no break in traffic, just a slight dip at 8am this morning.

I'll say this about giving Google my phone number... I have received no texts or phone calls that I didn't expect since giving them the number.  About the only thing I'm worried about is that the phone number I gave them is the very same number I gave them for my primary account.  If they ever want to investigate, they can easily link my two accounts together.

On to the cap! (I don't know why, but I'm picture the announcer from Super Friends...'Meanwhile in another part of the blog....')

So Ginger and I were talking last night about programs.  She had run into some roadblocks with Gimp and even after installing it and playing around a bit with it myself, we decided that there wasn't a way to do what she wanted.  Which is a shame as she was working on a banner for her new blog.

I had a brief glance at what she was trying to do, and I figured that I would snag the image and try to make her one.  She had shown me the image before, and while I didn't have a direct link, I remembered it was on Fuskator.  So I started searching through fuskator searching for that image.  After 21 pages (52 Galleries per page) and not finding it, I gave up on doing this as a surprise.  Because let me tell you, when you are searching through fuskator and in the mood to cap, you will easily find photos that beg to be capped.

Like this one.

This positioning made it perfect for a shemale/sissy cap.  And the background (which I've now mostly covered up with the text) screamed out Italian villa to me.  The idea came pretty quick to me... a guy on a tourist group tour of Italy gets bored, runs off, finds a place that he thinks is a resort and is transformed there and sold off to some Italian stud with a taste for sissies.

I wrote out the story, but knew that I was in for some major editing.  I had almost two and a half pages of text and knew that it wouldn't all fit into this single image.  And since this image was from the ending of the story, and none of the other images in the set matched anything near the begining of the story, I couldn't just pull a second image in to make a 'first' panel.

So before I got down to the serious editing I went into Photoshop and started laying out the cap.  That would give me an idea of how much text would fit, and therefore let me know how much I had to cut.   It turned out I would need to cut more than half of the story.

Going back into word I focused on what I wanted to say, and started to just roughly cut out anything that didn't directly relate to that.  It was painful and I was sorry to see some parts go (and no... I didn't save the original) but it was for the best.  This version is far more focused and I think a lot better.

(although I do miss the part about how the language of 'oohh' and 'ahhh' are universal)

The problem is the story was still longer than what I wanted.  I knew right where the title would be, and I wanted the story to fit entirely into the text box in the upper left corner.  When I went to add another text box for the final paragraph I was stumped as to where it should go.  Here are two mockups I was trying to choose from:

As you can see I was still early in the design process.  The fonts and colors were all from my previous cap.  The first image I liked because the text boxes line up.  But i don't like how it covers up some of the man, as well as our heroine's leg.  I like the second image as it doesn't cover anything up beyond the guy's legs below the knee (which actually lets you focus on HER instead)... but I now had three shapes (the two text boxes and the title) instead of two.

I must have went back and forth for about 20 minutes without making a single edit or change and without making a decision as to which I liked better (or disliked least).  Thankfully Mistress Simone was online and I was able to bounce it off of her (and that's the only reason I have these versions to show).  Simone mentioned that she liked the second version as it didn't interfere with the image as much, so I thanked her and went forward with that version.

A quick aside... I'm finding myself able to do that more often now.  Ask for someone's opinion on an obviously unfinished project.  Even just a few months ago I couldn't stand to show someone a cap that wasn't almost completely done.  Even if that person was a fellow cap artists who's own work I respect.

Anyway... I think this is another fun story and hope everyone gets a kick out of it.