Reflections

Relationships can reflect each other.  

I was surprised when I came across this image.  I'd just woken up and was catching up on my Discord servers before I moved on to checking mail, blogs, and posting to Twitter (still not X).  There's many beautiful images on these discords but this one just struck a cord.  I knew as soon as I saw it that a woman's boyfriend was forcing her husband to be feminized.  He, the husband, knew the boyfriend was a twin and together they were using both the wife and the husband, blackmailing him into the relationship without the wife's knowledge.  And honestly, as I write that out, that's the entirety of the cap.  All I've done with ten paragraphs is give those delicious little details on how, when, and why the relationships progressed.  

I started writing it out with the idea of it being a cap as I really liked the image and it had an obvious balance to it with space for the text, but it became clear early that this wasn't an easy story to tell in a short period of time.  So, I wrote it out trying to be short but not cutting away pieces of the story that seemed fun.  When I finished writing, I saw that it was clearly going to be two panels.  I knew I could post it as an Obscurra or post it to tumblr but the image was just begging for the full cap experience.  

I'd been playing with the idea of 'reflections' in the story as it was a nice reference to the mirrored image in the photo.  But it struck me... I could do that for a cap.  I could 'reflect' the photo itself.  And then, as an even more fun design aspect, I could see how much I could actually 'reflect'.  

The first two aspects were easy enough.  Both the title and my watermark could be mirrored images of each other.  The next part would be difficult.  Ideally, the text boxes would need to be the exact same size.  If they were taller or shorter in the second panel, it would really disrupt the 'mirrored' image vibe.  So this story was heavily modified to cut some out of the first 'half' and add more to the second 'half'.  Then, when I saw how the paragraphs kind of lined up, I took it even a step further.  Three paragraphs in the first panel of the first cap, two paragraphs in the second.  Two paragraphs in the first panel of the second cap, three in the second. They don't line up exactly, but they're close and it should be another subconscious hint that it's a reflection.  

The actual hardest part, once I had the layout done, was the text boxes and text themselves.  These text boxes cover almost pure white in the wall AND almost pure black in her stockings.  That's tough to do without absolutely blanketing the image.  And I really wanted to keep as much detail of the image as possible as I loved the way her legs looked.  I normally put down the text that would fit best if there were no text box.  Say dark text if the background is mostly light, light text if the background is mostly dark.  Then the textbox gets a color picked out from the background and compliments the text.  Finally, the text box's opacity gets reduced until I can see through it and see some of the obscured background. Sometimes there's nothing in the background I care to see (the back of a room, for example), other times there's basic shapes (the lower half of a model).  This time, it was an extreme of all of that.  In the end, I was changing the opacity level of the text box by single percents until I was satisfied (if you're curious, they have an opacity of 87%).  

Anyway, I like the cap.  I think it's a fun squirmy story and a fun little headgame of a design.  The only thing I regret is not shoehorning 'reflection' and 'mirror' into the story more.