Our Private Journal

 Private means Private!

This is a cap I made for it12707.  As I had just made him a cap recently I figured it would be pretty easy to make another that he liked.  Like last time I actually went to get some images first.  Mainly because I find it difficult to make 'clean' caps, and it's just easier if the image tells me a story.  So when I came across this image set, I thought the whole diary angle might work.  Especially with the two sets of hands tugging at it.

Since I covered up most of the images (more on that later), here are the originals:

So I went back to it12707's preferences and these caught my eye:

• A change in roles. Boyfriend to sister, best friend to mother, peer to underclassmen, etc.
• Multiple transformations are super-neat

After reading these, I worked on the backbone of the story.  I really liked the idea of 'Boyfriend to Sister', and didn't specifically see anything about a body swap, so the hands in the picture would be it12707's and the sister's.  When he read the journal, he'd body swap with her.  

At that point I hesitated.... I wanted this to be a warmer cap, and the thought of a young woman getting transferred into his body didn't seem quite right.  I wanted his girlfriend to focus on him and his new body, not her sister in his hold body.  So the idea of the journal changing people grew a bit larger... her sister had left quite awhile ago, and he wasn't swapping with her.  Just the person who was in her body at that time.  That spiraled out a bit as I imagined different people reacting to being in the body.  And as I thought of mutliple people, it hit me that I could use a couple different hand written fonts on a paper like text box, to look like their writing.  I could even try to conjour up several types of voices... 

And with that I was running.  I knew I'd still need a regular block of text to get the ball rolling, so I wrote up that part really quick.  I didn't plan on him switching iwth a twelve year old girl, but that came out as I was writing how she was acting strange, and I just went with it.  Once I had him to the point of swapping, I switched out and wanted to tell the rest of the story through the journal.  

As these were the only two images with the journal in it, I had to cut down my idea of four or five body swaps down to three.  So I started by writing about a man that had swapped into Allison's body.  He enjoyed being female, but didn't like the idea of learning about being a woman while also attending college... so he swapped with the neighboor girl. 

Writing out her part took longer as I specifically tried to write 'wrong'.  Not that girls don't write well... but 12 year old ones generally don't.  So I messed with apostrophes, capitalization  punctuation and even purposefully misspelled a  few words.  I also tried to have her write more from the hip, moving from subject to subject quickly and without any preamble.  

And then finally I finished with it12707's part where I wrapped everything up.  

With the story written, I went into design mode... and oh my god what a pain that was.  The first thing I did was add in the original text and text box to look normal.  Then I started a new file and attempted to use handwritten fonts on a paper background.   The hard part of this was keeping the text big enough to read, but small enough to not take up to much space over the photo.  

I didn't save any 'in process' versions, but I had the three text boxes (the two journal pages and the normal text box) in just about every combination you can think of.  I'll admit that I'm not really happy with how the final version looks... I just simply stopped playing around with it.  I don't HATE how it looks.. I just want it to look better.  

Anyway.. I hope it12707 likes it, and I hope all of you out there enjoy it as well!