Dress Model to Runway Model

Career steps can be fun!

So next up on my list at the Haven is wraithstrike.  Wraithstrike has what I consider a pretty good set of preferences.  She isn't shy about saying what she likes and dislikes, but her tastes are pretty varied.  My only issue is that she prefers cleaner caps (PG13-R).  Thankfully she also likes a good story to go with her caps.  Making a longer more detailed story would have been perfect a year ago when I was writing longer and longer stories.   But now a days I'm shying away from that.  I prefer now to set the mood, and give the reader enough details to fill in the blanks.

I think on this attempt, I split the difference.  Its a much shorter story than I would write a year ago, but longer than I do now.  When I started, I looked over wraith's preferences.  I especially focused on her 'Deeper Fantasies' and liked the idea of becoming a dress model.   But the photo I had in mind (a woman getting her dress altered as she was wearing it) was a little more difficult to find than I thought it would be.  There were quite a few out there, but most of them looked like they were taken with a camera phone.

So I opened up the search to include the runway, hoping to find a 'behind the scenes' photo set.  Low and behold I found just such a set.   It was behind the scenes at some fashion show.  But when I looked at the images, there weren't any of the models getting dressed.  Most of them were makup.

And as I was looking at these, the basic idea for this story came to mind.  It was simple.... guy goes to seamstress to help out his girlfriend, gets coralled into trying on the dress, comes back to work as a seamstress model, gets transformed to do the job better, and pursues a career as a runway model.  That way the picture of a model getting her makeup put on would work, and I could still write the story to fit into wraithstrike's deeper fantasies.

A couple images caught my fancy:

Love the look on her face, but I'm not quite sure didn't love what the makeup artist was doing.  Plus the background was a little busy without adding to the story.

Great expression, and better makeup artist work, but the background still didn't work for me.  Plus.. her teeth. Ick.

Good expression for an unwilling cap... but at this point of the story ruby would be very willing.  Plus the makeup artist's face.... eww.

Again, a good non willing expression, and a better background, but still not my cup of tea...

Almost there.  My only problem with this, is that her hair doesn't look better.  Sure it could be before her hair gets done, and I probably would have used it that way, if I didn't find the next image.

Now that's the expression I was looking for!  Her hair is better, her expression could be used both as willing AND unwilling... Mmm... it was almost perfect!  The only problem I had was the lipstick color.  I didn't think that the purple shade they were using was quite the way I wanted to go.

So I pulled the image into Photoshop and tired to manipulate the color.   I had limited success... I couldn't quite get it to look distinctive enough from her regular lip color while staying in the red spectrum.  So while I had no intention of using a black and white image, I just went with it.  That way I could color just the area of her lips that are covered.  And voila!  I had my image.

I had to crop the image fairly close and then flip it to get enough room for the way I wanted the text boxes to lay.  But I think it looks pretty good and works with the story.