Pretty Pink Posies

Don't you love choices!

So Kira (XtremeCSSA) made me a wonderful cap recently, and she was the last person on my Cap Debt list, so while still feeling particularly cappy, I decided to make her's today.  Now I love Kira's caps.  They are always nice and twisted and dark.  But I don't feel that the few I've made for her match up very well.  Technically they follow her preferences, but they just aren't very Xtreme.

So my first goal was to find a good bondage pick, preferably with a goth girl.  There are many to choose from, but most have that 'snapshot' feel to them, and I personally prefer more professorial photographs.  I then came upon this image:

I really loved the expression in her eyes.  She looks (at least to me) really frustrated and upset and I thought this could work for Kira.  The initial thought was that Kira here had to make a choice between two bad things, and the protagonist relishes letting Kira know that it was her choice.  


So I opened up word and started writing.  My thought design was that this would be a quick oneliner back and forth discussion over the blank space.  But as I started writing out the choices (some seen in the photo, some just talked about), I realized I liked all of them.  Even if I used a small font, I wouldn't be able to fit them in the blank space on this photo.  Since I would have to design this in a more standard way, I decided to make it more of the protagonist talking, while Kira is just thinking her response, as that adds more of a frustrated feeling.  


The story wrote itself fairly quickly once I put it into that form.   But then came the design.  I knew that I didn't have a lot of text, so I started with my standard 900x900 size.  But any way that I cropped the photo seemed to cut out parts I wanted.  Some examples of crops I tried:

I liked this as a basic start, but I didn't want to see the blank space under her chin, and in the lower right corner.  

This was better, but I was still left with a lot of blanks space in the corner.

I figured I might crop out the exact parts I want and use them near each other, but I couldn't get a layout I was happy with, and just kept thinking 'where is her nose?"

Thats when I tried the think vertical crop.  Yes I am missing her collar and one of her eyes, but I still feel that it kept the expression I wanted to capture.  In fact I think it emphasizes it.  It also fit nicely into the 900x900 format.  

Once I had the crop down, the photo in place, and the text in, I was stumped as to the color.  I had two conflicting thoughts.  First that it should be very muted and dark.  This would follow along with the tone of Kira's thoughts.  But at the same time I was thinking pretty and pink to emphasize the tone of the protagnist.  So Played around with dark first.  The closest I came to what I wanted was this:

While I overall like the darker look better, I didn't think it matched with the humor in the story.  In fact I feel that it dulls down the dark humor at the end, and thats just not what I was going for.  So I 'pinked' it up and ended up with the final version.  

So you tell me:  Which version is better?  The dark or the pink one.