Marriage of Inconvenience

So today is a little messed up.  I expected it to be like any other Sunday and headed into work at 4 AM.  But when I went to clock in I found out that I wasn't even scheduled to be there.  Talk about a downer... I was already wide awake and on my second up cup of coffee so going back to sleep wasn't an option.  When I got back home I did my normal morning web crawl of news and sports sites, then my normal Caitlyn web crawl of DX and TG blogs.  When I was done catching up I was both in a capping mood AND in a Caitlyn mood... so that means capping!  YAY!

But I didn't find any images that inspired me. There were plenty of sexy images, but none gave me a story to work off of.  So I had breakfast, watched some news (lemme tell you... Sunday morning news sucks!), and took a brief nap.  When I woke up I was STILL in the mood to cap and STILL in a Caitlyn mood.  So I came back to fuskator and found this image:

No real story came to mind, but I got the very strong feeling of 'forced sissy'.  I normally don't try to cap without more of an idea ahead of time, but I figured why wast this rare feeling.  I knew it wouldn't exactly be blazing a new trail, but I just followed along with that idea and fleshed it out some.  To have a reluctant sissy I figured I would need both a dominatrix style character and a compelling reason for our heroine to not just walk away.  I played with the idea of him getting a sham marriage to get into the United States, but figured I'd need something more compelling than deportation for him to go so far.  The easiest answer was obvious... flip the script.  SHE needs a marriage of convenience to get into the States.

That brought on a lot of fun little details.  Stuff like thinking he could change this lesbian into a straight woman, and she'd have to go along to keep up the appearance of a marriage and his friends egging him on to do it.  All I needed was a reason for her to turn the tables on him.   The rest of the story could be squirmy details of his transformation, so I went to writing.

My first pass was.... well it sucked.  I couldn't get enough detail in without blowing up the whole story, or leaving out most of the transformation.  So I started over, but this time eliminated his story by writing it in her perspective.  That really worked and I wrote most of the story in one pass.

I was happy enough with the story that I moved into design mode.  I knew I could fit the story over the image with a simple L text box, but I feel like I've been doing that too much so I went to my 'tilted' format and tried to fit the story into two separate boxes.  It worked... but I wasn't happy with how big the boxes had to be:

I figured I could live with a less than stellar design but as I was lining up the title and adding my watermark I just kept coming back to the problems.  Her face covered up... the blank lower left corner... the less than clear title...  So I started over.  Even though it's what I wanted to avoid, I realized it would work so much better with an L shaped text box.  I could cover up the blank corner and show her face with that.  Once I had the text box and text in place, I even found that i could enlarge the image some and make the title fit better over her arm.  As a quick laugh I also changed the title from 'Convenience' to 'Inconvenience'.

There are a few edits to the story, but just to make the text fit a bit better.  Nothing major.  Overall I'm happy with the cap.  At the same time, I'm a little disappointed that I ended up more or less with the very design that I wanted to avoid.

True Friend

And now they'll be life long friends!

So I've owed Smitty several captions for quite a while now.  I think I've owed this cap since September.  Needless to say, I feel pretty bad for going this long without returning the wonderful Kinetic Text style cap that Smitty made for me... but honestly this hasn't been from a lack of trying.  It's just that I couldn't get the combination of images, story idea and just pure creative drive to make something really good.

Seeing as Smitty made me a Kinetic Text style cap, I wanted to do the same.  But I'm starting to think that maybe this isn't a good match.  You see when I think of making a cap for Smitty, I think of hot dirty squirmy caps.  I think of the type of caps that make you blush and look away, but still feel compelled to continue reading.  But lately when I think of the Kinetic Text style caps.... I think of them as more emotional.  More soulful.  That's not to say that I can't make a hot dirty Kinetic cap, nor that I can't make smitty an emotional soulful cap... but to combine either of those requires a perfect trinity of image, story idea and creative drive.

And as I said... I haven't had all three of those for awhile.   I've seen images that made me smile and blush (and moisten my panties), and even got a basic story from them... but it wasn't very smitty and I couldn't get the drive together for them.  I've had an idea and the drive... but no images.  I've even had the drive and images, but they just didn't tell me a story.

So... out of pure frustration, I decided that Smitty would just be getting a single or a straightforward series.  I still owe him two more caps, so I might still come up with everything to make a really good one.

With that in mind I started an image search the other day with just 'Smitty' in mind.  I found the following image, and fell in love:

At first it didn't give me any story idea, but I figured if I got one later, I may as well save it.  I even saved the link to the whole set on fuskator (go ahead and look!).  Then last night while watching television (The Rachel Maddow show of all things), I got an idea.  I honestly have no idea where it came from, as it doesn't relate to anything I saw on TV that night.   A guy helping a friend's father design the perfect girlfriend for his buddy.  As he told the father about what he friend would want the father would question him on how his thoughts worked.... making it obvious to anybody that this friend had just about everything they needed in a girlfriend except for the body (and obviously the desire to have sex with a man!).

I didn't have the image before me, but I did think that I could make the story work.  The girl he would describe would be the woman here, and I even  figured I could add in the position she was in somehow.  This morning I gave it a swing.... I pulled the image into Photoshop as a visual reminder and started to write. Most of the text in the text box came out in the first try.  The only problem with the story was that it didn't directly involve the image.  Sure... he talked about a variation on that position, and described the woman, but I never actually put him in that position.  And since I wrote it as Smitty's side of the conversation, it felt awkward to write out that part.  I decided that it would have to do... but when it was in the layout it just felt... off.  Wrong.

Understand, there are a LOT of caps that I enjoy that have a leap between the story and the image.  I get them... I think smitty (as well as most readers) would get this... but it just didn't feel right.  So I saved it and went about my day.  When I hit it back up this afternoon the idea came to me much in the same way the story idea did... just write out the 'moment' of hte image in a variation on the Kinetic Text style.  The little snippets did A pretty good job of linking the 'story' with the 'image'.  And it was fun to write it out as thoughts... especially "Where is lil' smitty!!"

I liked the way it looked but at first was conserend that the readers would read the larger kinetic text first.  But when I looked it over and read it I realized that it worked either way.  I'm not happy since I have wanted to make a full on Kinetic Text style cap for some time and this feels like a half measure... but at the same time I think that the cap works.

I hope both smitty and all of you out there enjoy it!

Decisions Decisions

So after making "True Friend" yesterday I really didn't think I'd be making a caption today. But as I do on most days I at least check out the newest posts to fuskator.  I mean, you never know when inspiration will strike right?  Well lo and behond inspiration DID strike.

When I saw this image, I just fell in love with the color spectrum used.  the dark and moody purples and blues contrasting with the happy tasty oranges really gave a duality to the image.  And her indifferent expression was very cappable.

The story idea came from all of that.  I pictured a dark story about someone transforming/torturing another person... giving that villain speech as it were... only to be interrupted mid villainous statement from the person saying that they aren't bothered by the procedures, but they want to stop as they now have the perfect body.

I though that this might be a pretty fun and funny cap, disguised up in a dark wrapper.  And when I think of fun and funny caps, I often think of Kaitlyn.  She's more sweet than dark... but I think that this treatment would tickle her funny bone.

It wasn't hard to write out the story... I just had to NOT think of Katilyn when writing the first part.  I wanted anybody reading it to think that this is one of my normal dark captions.   Then when I felt that I've set the mood, I completely switched gears and tried to go for a funny Katilynesqe voice to finish it off.

I figured a simple design would work best.  There really isn't much that I could do to the photo to enhance the dark feel from it, so I tried to do as little as possible.  So no ext box, no borders, not special filters on the title.  Just a single font/color for the 'mad scientist' and one font/color for Katilyn's voice.  It was easy enough to mimic those fonts and colors for the title, and then simply line the title up to fit exactly with the story.  The only issue I have with this layout is the empty space between the title and the model.  I don't think it's bad., and in all honesty I can't think of a clean way to fill up the space... but I'm not entirely happy with it.

Anyway.. this was a fun quick cap when I didn't expect to get anything.  At minimum I can be happy with that!