we're all SLAVES to something

What are you a slave to?

So next up on my Cap Debt list is Mistress Simone.  I adore capping Simone.  It's a chance to explore the 'Mistress' voice that I love to read and find so difficult to capture.  I don't mean the evil bitch that transforms her boyfriend out of spite or cruelty... I mean the loving sultry exotic woman who with a mere glance knows that a man would better be off a woman, and vows to do that for him.  Not TO him... but FOR him.

And with Mistress Simone's preferences, I actually get to explore the whole Dominant/submissive dynamic as she also likes to be transformed into a submissive named Chloe.  Now... it's hard for me to imagine the fictional character of 'Simone' as anything other than a loving kind yet strong Mistress.  But I like the idea that she wasn't always that way.  She wasn't born with a whip in one hand and a cock cage in the other.  No, I picture her getting transformed from her 'Mark' persona into her 'Simone' persona by going through a slave state known as Chloe.

Now, even before I got the idea of capping Simone, I was looking for an image to cap.  I came across this image and the only thing I saw was Simone:

Cool, sexy, calm, yet completely in command.  Her look isn't one of cruelty or meanness... it's just one of being in control.  I saved the image back, hoping that I'd get a cap out of it later.  Well, today is 'later'.  This morning I started playing around with the image.  I didn't have a story in mind, but I figured that by looking into her alluring eyes that one would come to me.  The first thing I did was try to get rid of that white light.  It's distracting and taking away from 'her'.  I probably could have cloned and drawn it out, but the easier path was cropping it out.  But cropping that much of the image out didn't leave me with much room to put a story in... so I also had to enlarge the image.  The original was 826x622 pixels.  My cropped but enlarged version is 900x1054 pixels.  Enlarging any image that much will give you some jpg artifacts so I applied a 'surface blur' filter to it:

That looked a lot better, but I still didn't have a full story.  I had a basic idea... a Mistress talking to a member of her clandestined order.  Telling him how good he is at changing men into sexy women, but complaining that all of his slaves were sex objects, and not complete women.  She'd then say that the only way he could take over was to be a woman himself.... and then poof... Mark becomes Mistress Simone.

I liked the idea because if I wrote it right, you'd think the Mistress talking in the begining was actually Simone.  Only at the end would you realize that the man is Mark, and that this is about the transformation INTO Simone.

It had it's flaws and needed work before I started writing, so I kept working on the image.  With the light ball removed, the picture was now down to just a few colors.  The black/grey background, the light reflecting off her chair, her hair, her flesh and her bright red lips.  I thought it might be more powerful of an image though, if there was only one color to focus on.  So I made everything black and white except for her lips.  That was a little TO far in that direction so I reversed it and just lowered the saturation quite a bit, giving me this:

That fit the bill.  I could have the title in the lower right corner, and have the story in the upper right corner.  I was now ready to start the story, but the more I thought it through, the less I liked the story idea I had.  It might be a little fun, and have a nice zinger at the end, but it didn't push the 'sultry' button enough.  And it made Mark into a Master and immediately get transformed into a Mistress.  It completely ignored the slave middle part that I liked so much.

So, I canned that idea, saved the image and went to watch television.  When I came back and looked at the image a few hours later I tried to imagine how with this single image that I'd get Mark to Chloe to Simone.  When I thought of it that way it was clear... this would be Simone as she's talking to a new slave project of hers.  Explaining how she wasn't always the Goddess that she appears as now.  So in a way, she'd be both explaining what she want through (letting Simone get the thrill of a transformation into a slave) and also explaining what she did to the slave before her (letting Simone get the thrill of transforming someone else into a slave).

And the more I thought about it, the more that word kept ringing in my ears... slave.  It's then that the real focus came to me.  This wouldn't just be about how Mark became Chloe became Simone... it would be how througout she was always a slave, and still is to this day.  Just not a slave to a Master or Mistress.

You see, this goes to the idea in the back of my head of what a Mistress/slave relationship is.  Sure, the slave in that relationship has to give up her freedom.... in the cases of TG caps she even gives up her masculinity... but beyond pleasing her Mistress she isn't doing much.  The Mistress on the other hand is constantly thinking about and working on her slave.  She's molding the clay of her soul into that of a submissive and happy pet.  She's molding the flesh of her into that of a curvy sexy seductive woman.  In other words the Mistress is really a slave to her slave... or at least the process of enslaving her slave.

So with that idea I started to write.  And of course as is common when I get excited and into a story, it grew faster than I could keep up.  When I finished writing and read it, I liked it enough to not want to cut major parts of it out.  So I had to readjust my layout.  I tried making an odd shape around her head, arm and hand, but even that didn't give me enough room.  So I put the text back into a regular rectangular box and let it flow down as far as it needed... right over her hand.

No matter what I did though, the hand just looked really odd under the text:

So I kept working.... I decided that I didn't need the hand so it got darkened out.  With the hand gone, I also decided to darken out the chair as this would leave the image as nothing but Mistress Simone.  No distractions.  I also realized that it felt a little odd to have the photo on the left (don't ask me why... it just does) so I flipped the image around to have the text on the left hand side.  I tweaked the size of the text and even cropped it some more (taking out most of her legs), and was finally happy.  All that was left was to add the title and my watermark and it's done.

I'm happy with this cap.  I hope Simone will like it as well as everybody else!