Unexpected date night

 

Can a good friend be a good date?

So this cap came about in a kind of strange way... but hey I'll take cap inspiration anyplace I can get it!

On Wednesday of this week I got into the mood and made up three obscuras.  I already have Army Wives Club and Spiritual Mentor posted, and will be posting "Marriage Counseling" tomorrow.  That's kind of my new 'normal'.  I don't get the urge all that often and don't berate myself one little bit when inspiration doesn't strike.  When it DOES strike, I'll often be able to knock out two or three different obscuras and to make sure I don't just dump a whole bunch on one day and then go silent for a week or so, I'll just line them up and post them once a day.

So today started out like any other;  I did my morning routine of sports and news and other things, then went to look for some inspiration at fuskator.   I swear, I really need a better source of images as it's hard to find non 'hawt' obscura material there.  Anywho, nothing really caught my fancy so I posted Spiritual Mentor and went about my day.  I posted to my private blog, visited DX (did I mention that I'm starting to play there again?), and then started visiting other blogs.  It's been a busy week so I haven't had the chance to really read anything blog wise and was really looking forward to spending an hour or so catching up.

Well the first blog on my list at that time was Erin's Lustful Thoughts.  If you haven't visited her blog yet, then you need to get it in gear and check her out.   Erin's caps are a great mixture of fun, sexy, creative, well designed, well laid out, well written art.  Even with her great caps she's not getting all that much traffic, and she deserves far more attention than she's getting.   Anywho, I stopped by Erin's blog and saw her most recent cap "Unexpected".  The story, like most great caps, is simple enough to follow... a guy's roommate agrees to go out with his room mate while dressed up en-femme.  The story is told from the guy's perspective as he zips up his room mate's dress.

Awesome.

Now if this were my cap, I thought to myself, I'd have written it from the other room mate's perspective.  That's probably one of the reasons I liked it so much... it takes a standard trope and turns it on it's ear.  I didn't give it much more thought and moved on.  The next blog on my list was Simone's Tumbler.  I like Simone's Tumbler as she posts some great images there.  I've taken a few of her images there and made caps/obscuras out of them, but now a days when I see an image that I really like I try to back track it to it's original blog.  That way maybe I can strike upon inspiration while not stealing from Simone so directly.

Anyway, I came upon this image:

The image immediately reminded me of Erin's wonderful cap... and the momentum had begun.  I figured I'd post this image and write up a quick obscura.  But as I got into it, I realized I wanted this to be a cap.  Not only a cap, but a cap for Erin.  Seriously, she's honestly impressed me and I don't comment and let her know that nearly enough.   So the least I can do is make a cap for her.  I know that she's on the Haven, so I logged in over there and looked up her preferences.  Now, she doesn't specifically list cross dressing as a turn on, but she doesn't list it as a turn off either, so I decided to keep that as the going theme.  And as I thought while reading her cap, I just wrote it from the dress wearer's perspective... in this case Erin.

With this image prominent on my screen I got to writing.  The story came out in one fell swoop.  When I re-read it and edited it, it only needed a few small changes.  Of course I say that now, moments after posting it to the Haven and I might see some major flaws later, but for now let me have my  happy glow!

Next up came the layout.   My inital thought as I was writing it out was something like this:

But that just didn't work for me.  For one I was covering up quite a lot of the photo that way.  Sure, I'd need to cover up a lot of the photo anyway as I wrote a 4 paragraph story, but it covers up her shapely bottom, her heels, and even the stair mentioned in the story.  Plus, thinking ahead, it didn't leave a good placement for the title.  So I nixed that and thought about having the text laid out as it is in the original.

This worked a lot better in my opinion.  Not only did it show the stair, it let her heels poke out.  More than that though, it felt like she was almost hiding behind the text box.  Kind of like she was hiding behind all of  her boy clothes in the past... and maybe was hiding behind the pretense that she was just having dinner with a room mate instead of a date.  Mmm... that probably didn't come out int he story and I wasn't about to edit it and add something like t hat into it, but I liked it.  So that's about where the text would stay.  The title would obviously go in the upper left hand corner somewhere as it would help balance the weight of the text box.

Now when I put text in like this, it is almost always either black text over a white background, or white text over a black background.  That helps me focus on the layout and once I'm happy with that part I can work on the design... the color.  I knew that somehow I had to work red into this.  Her lips were just begging for it.  But as I played with variations... red text over a white background, red text over a black background, light red text over a dark grey, dark red over a light grey, I realized that it was losing the red lips.   I mean lets face it, size wise the lips are small and any red in the text area overwhelmed it.

It hit me out of nowhere, but it made perfect sense and really I was surprised I hadn't thought of it from the beginning... take out all the color in the image except for the red lips.  From there it was quick edit after quick edit.  Pull the color out, add the red back into the lips, flip the image horizontally (I like the face looking over her right shoulder better... don'taskmewhy), color the text and text box, and finally add in the title.  At first I was going to just copy Erin's cap name... Unexpected... but I thought I had done enough cap idea thievery from her and instead added the 'date night' so that it was as much homage as it was stealing.

Anywho, at the moment I'm happy with this.  As always I hope my subject, Erin, is too as well as you my faithful reader!

*NOTE* This post was unpublished on July 5, 2022 because it violated Blogger policy.  Specifically they said "Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy."  I haven't changed this since it was originally posted so I have no idea where this problem came from.  To try and keep it up I removed all links, deleted the graphics, and re-uploaded them.