The Importance of being Detailed

They say the devil is in the details!

So last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I had this idea on how to present an image.  I'm sure I've seen it in some movie or some television commercial  but I can't think of specifically when.  The idea was having a box float in front of a black and white image... and inside that box the image would appear in full color.  I liked the idea and even thought on how to utilize it in a still cap... I could do multiple panels with the box highlighting a specific area of a girl's body, and each panel would be her complaining to a doctor that she hadn't had that feature before... she had been a man before.

At that point I fell asleep.  Surprisingly I remembered all the little details.  But I held off on making the cap for a few hours as I figured it would look interesting, and I wanted to make this cap for Smitty (he was next up on my cap debt list).

While thinking of details for the cap, I went over the last few captions we've made for each other, but didn't get inspiration there.  I then went over to Smitty's blog and noticed something... he's been using a LOT of shemale pics lately.  They work perfectly for the over the top sissy caps he's been pumping out lately.   But I have to admit... I find it a bit of a turn off.  I know, I know... I can have a curvy sexy woman working over a huge cock in any number of my caps... but there's just something 'off' about seeing an actual shemale in the photo.

I guess while I'm still opening up to various types of caps written for me, I'm also firming up on my specific desires for photographs used in caps... I like studio style photographs as opposed to snapshots, and I like real women in my photos.  Even if the person portrayed is supposed to be merely crossdressing or a full on breast having shemale.

But seeing as Smitty liked using those photos, I figured I could make this a little more special by using a shemale for him.  And there has constantly been one girl that I like... Bailey Jay.  Not only is she damned sexy, there are a lot of images of her out there.

So I went to find an image.  I figured I would like to have about four panels, so I needed to show off four parts of her body.  Her breasts and her penis were obvious choices... her eyes would make sense... but what else?  As I looked through the images on Google Images though I realized that I had another problem... finding a single image that would show off all of these body parts.  Sure, I could find a great image of Bailey's tits... but those images generally hid her little friend.  I could find an image that showed off her eyes and her lips... but those were generally face shots.

I eventually decided that I would use multiple images of her.  I'd even accept that some details would change from shot to shot like her hair.  I could just hope that the overall layout and design would help everyone look past that.

When I narrowed my search down to images that just showed one part of her, I had a lot of images to pick from.  Here are a few that I picked out, but didn't use:

Once I had several images to pick from, I moved on to laying out the actual panel. I actually used one of the last caps I made for smitty ("Virtuous Sins") as a template since I knew it had a lot of guidelines already in place.  Instead of the four tall images, I just had the photo take up all of that space.  To get this effect, I pulled the image in, making sure that it flowed off one side.  I then copied the layer and cropped the bottom layer to fit within the square shape and made it black and white (I also lightened it a bit, giving the color portion a little more contrast).  Next I went to the color layer and selected out a portion, deleting the rest.  This portion would run from the edge of hte panel to about 3/4 of the way to the other side of the photo.  That way it would have that 'moving into the frame' feel.

From there it was a simple matter to give it a shadow and an outline.  Once the first color section was made, it would act as a template so that all of the color sections would be the same size.  I'd love to show you how I did this step by step... but with all the false starts I made, I've now done this about a dozen times.  I didn't save any partial frames, so I'd have to do it from scratch.  If you REALLY want to see how I did this, just ask in the comments, and I'll make a 'Behind The Layers' post demonstrating it step by step.

With the images finally selected and fit into the panels, I then I had to write the story.  I kind of used a mix of Dee's and my writing styles... some of it I wrote inside the frame, while other parts I wrote in word.  You can probably tell which panels utilized which style (quick hint... it's easy to get wordy in Word).

At first I had both Smitty's voice and the Doc's voice in the same text box.  But it just looked wrong.  So I deleted the text box, and played around with having each voice stand up on it's own.  Sadly I couldn't find two different fonts that I was happy with and since I didn't want to use colors for the text, I had to have a text box for Smitty's voice that allowed me to make his text white.

The fact that the text boxes flow off the panel was a happy accident.  I was moving one section around and had the wrong layer selected.  When I zoomed out I saw the text box flowing off the page, and I realized it looked like the color section of the photo... so I copied that same effect on all of Smitty's text boxes.

Once I had that done, it was a simple (but repetitive .. four panels!) matter of placing the title in and adding my watermark.  Overall, I'm very happy with how the cap came out.  Yes, it's a little photo heavy, but I think they're all gorgeous images of Bailey, and the short text keeps it snappy and funny.

I hope Smitty likes it, and I hope all of you out there do too!