A Man of my word

No matter what you agree to, you should live up to your word. 

This was a fun cap.  Not so much for the finished project or the story, but for the idea I had and the implementation of said idea.  I wrote in my last post that it's been since January that I've made a cap.  I normally don't let that type of thing bother me any more, but I feel that I've been able to get into a groove of creating and yet I'm focusing all of that energy into writing instead of cap making.  And while I've been posting all of my caps to Twitter, I realized just how much joy that art form has brought me.  

So, yesterday I thought that if I came across an image that would work, I'd make a cap.  I'd specifically NOT make an obscura or tumblr post out of it which is normally where my head goes.  You see, I'm finally clicking in on my own internal processes, and a cap means a story in just a few paragraphs.  No long intro, no long series of specific scenarios or transformations, no lengthy wrap up... just a 'throw it up and knock it out of the park' style of writing.  If I start from that mindset, I think I can do it pretty well.   

The first image that I came across that inspired a story was this:

The problem with the image is that it's too small.  I wouldn't have the ability to make it into a cap.  So instead, I let my imagination fly and turned into a fairly long tumblr post.  I think its a fun story, but I still wanted to make a cap.  So, once that was posted I kept looking.  When I came across this image, I knew I had it.  

Not necessarily because of the story it brought to mind (a guy dressing up along with his girlfriend to show her how easy it is to be beautiful), but because of the image itself.  Her eyes hidden behind her hair, her ridiculously high heels (for what she's currently wearing), her nipped in waist in a pose that shows off her ass, and just a sense of nervousness that I get from it.  She's waiting for something, something that she doesn't want to happen but is going to do anyway.  And as you can see, the image is plenty large enough to make a cap out of.  It's even cropped in a way that I can pull it in on the left, and put the text on the right.  

Now, imagining the story and cap and making the story and cap are two different things.  I started this yesterday morning.  It didn't take long for me to write the story up, but then came lunch.  After lunch, my new security camera got shipped to me and I spent an hour playing with that.  Then another hour.  Then I took it back to Best Buy, returned it, and bought a different camera. Then I spent an hour playing with that.  By the time I was done with all of that, I was both out of the mood to cap and had an incredibly bad migraine.  A "I'm going to hide in the dark forever and ever" type migraine.  So, I did just that and left the cap as it was, with just an image and a story.  

Fast forward to this morning.  Probably because of the migraine and a fairly early bedtime, I got up at 4 AM.  Four in the fucking morning!  At least being up that early let me casually get through my morning routine.  I read my emails, played the new New York Times game, caught up on social media, read through my 'Caitlyn' blogs and such looking for any new comments or responses, and finally turned my attention back to this project.  

As I brought the image into Photoshop I had a thought about all the caps I'd recently posted to Twitter.  You see, I each day I was posting two caps.  An old one and a newer one. The first day I literally posted my first cap and my newest cap.  The next day I posted my 2nd cap and my 2nd newest cap.  I kept working forward and backward with the caps, posting any new caps as I made them, wondering where they'd meet up.  When was the 'median' Caitlyn cap.  It turns out that was late June of 2012 (specifically Reversal Therapy).  

In the middle of 2012, I was just turning the last corner of my capping creative journey.  Between 2010, my beginning, and then I'd moved on from this type of design work:

To this:

You can see the first is a simple variation on the 'picture with text to the right' style.  Sure, it's not black text on a white background, and there are stylistic flairs like the pink line around the photo and the pink glow around the title... but design wise it's still basic.  By 2012 I had the image in the center, a background, the title practically intruding into the photo (sometimes it was IN the photo, sometimes it was crossing the line and half in / half out of the photo), and the story itself were in sperate text boxes.  

I was even doing my current style of a text box and title all within the photo like this:

Just take a second, like I did when posting these to twitter, and think about that.  In two years of making caps I had almost all of my designs down.  I'd even done the Kinetic Text style caps by then.  In the 12 years since then I've mostly stayed within those lines I'd drawn back then.  

This isn't meant to be an all melancholy 'whoa is me' type post.  It's just something to really think about.  Anyway, a lot of my caps back then were of this particular variety:

The photo inside a background with a textbox covering some of the photo and the background.  I'll be honest, as I was posting these to twitter, I really liked this style.  I think in my haste back then to always 'make something new' I kind of rushed past this phase of my creativity. 

That's all a long way of saying this:  I wanted to see what I could do with this photo in that old style.  At the same time, I wanted to compare it to my current more quick and dirty style.  When I got the image into Photoshop, I started with my current style even though I was fairly certain I'd like the older style better.  This was just a matter of my current style being muscle memory (creative muscles, not literal muscles!).  And to be honest, if I hadn't gone down this trip of memory lane, I'd actually be satisfied with it:

As I suspected, I like the '2012' version better.  It did, however, take quite a bit longer to make.  And not all of that difference is because I'm faster at my current style.  Here's a breakdown of (more or less) step by step of creating each (after writing the story of course):

• Current
• Rough crop image
• Use 'Rectangle Tool' to draw out space for the text
• Add the text
• Change the paragraph format to 'Justify Last Left' with no hyphenations
• Edit the text so that the last lines aren't just a couple words.
• Use 'Rectangle Tool' to draw a background behind the text
• Pick color for the background rectangle
• Adjust the opacity so that it's partially see-through but allows the text to be easily read
• Decide on a title (sometimes I already have this in mind)
• Place the title in as a text layer and play around with the font until I think it fits the tone of the story and the style of the photo
• Manipulate the title to be 'interesting' (in this case a small 'a', a large 'Man', and a small 'of my word'
• Finish the text with color and styles (stroke here, but it could be shadow or glow or some other style)
• Add my watermark
• Resize and place it
• Reduce opacity so that it's barely visible

• 2012
• Rough crop image
• Increase canvas size to give room around the image
• Use 'Rectangle Tool' to draw out space for the text
• Add the text
• Change the paragraph format to 'Justify Last Left' with no hyphenations
• Resize the text box so that the last lines aren't just a couple words.
• Final edit of the text if they still don't line up
• Use the 'Rectangle Tool' to draw a background behind the text
• Pick color for background rectangle
• Find an 'abstract' background that fits the tone of the image and is large enough to look good
• Place the abstract background behind the image and the text and move it around until it fits the feeling I'm going for
• Color it so that it matches the text box and the image
• Reduce the opacity of the text background rectangle is see-through but allows the text to be easily read over both the image and the abstract background
• Decide on a title (sometimes I already have this in mind)
• Place the title in as a text layer and play around with the font until I think it fits the tone of the story and the style of the photo
• Manipulate the title to be 'interesting' (in this case a small 'a', a large 'Man', and a small 'of my word'
• Finish the text with color and styles (stroke here, but it could be shadow or glow or some other style)
• Final crop to make the edges all line up
• In this case, above the photo, to the left of the photo, below the photo, to the right of the text box.
• Add my watermark
• Resize and place it
• Reduce opacity so that it's barely visible

As you can see, adding the background adds several steps.  It also complicates certain steps and leaves room for errors.  In this one, I messed up the spacing.  Ideally, the blank space to the left, above, and below the photo as well as to the right of the text box, should be roughly matched with some space between 'her' shoulder/hip and the text box over the photo.  I noticed it before I was done and could have fixed it, but I would have had to move the text and text background, increase the canvas size, and adjust the abstract background all over again.  

Anyway, I like this '2012' style and might start using it some more again.  It'll of course depend on the image itself as that will determine if this is even possible.  

Let me know if you like one design over the other!