Selfish Prick - Plus My Creative Process

The final reader request I have, plus a look at how I make my captions.

Before I get into the body of this post, I finally went back through my last couple batches of captions and responded to the comments that were left on them. I apologize for not doing it sooner.

Anyway, on to this cap. This request was sent in by Ryan who also pitched the idea for Misinformed. This time he wanted to see the other side of the coin, what would happen if you were a great friend and switched places with someone who found himself as the wrong gender? I threw this one together as a bit of a quickie, but I think it's a cute cap.

The other thing Ryan asked was if I would share how I actually go about making caps so I took some screenshots as I was making this one to show how I pull this all together.

As I've said before, I make all my captions in PowerPoint, mostly because I'm too lazy to learn how to properly use Photoshop or GIMP. Normally the first thing I do is aimless browse porn sites looking for any images that inspire me to write a story around them. But since I was working off a request this time, I already had an idea of the kind of pic I was looking for (note to new cappers, this is not recommended as I've found I'll waste a ton of time looking for a picture that perfectly matches what's in my head). I got lucky in that I found this one after about 30 minutes of searching, so I went ahead and threw in into PowerPoint.

From there I put in a text box and started writing. This story flowed pretty smoothly as I already knew where it was going so it only took me about 15 minutes to get it where I wanted. This was definitely towards the low end of how long it normally takes me to turn out the story, as I've spent upwards of three hours trying to get a single panel of text just right. But on average I'd say a typical story takes me 30-45 minutes. To make the text legible I filled in the text box with color and then turned up the transparency to make it look a little better.

Next comes the title, and I came up with this one the same way I always do, by reading the story and then taking what I think is the most memorable line or phrase from it. I then throw that in another text box and match the color scheme with the color of the text box I used. As far as fonts go, a while ago I googled "free fonts" and downloaded a couple so that I wasn't limited to what comes standard with Microsoft Office.

After that I size and rotate the title to fit in some blank space in my cap, in this case the lower left corner.

The last thing I add is my name, which I match with the same color scheme as the title.

Now all that's left to do is crop it and I'm done.

And that's how I make my caps. The only thing that changes for my caps with vertical images is I search for free backgrounds to lay everything on top of (you can literally search "blue background", or any other color, and find a lot of the backgrounds I've used).

So to those of you who read all of this, I hope it was interesting for you. If you've got any questions feel free to leave me a comment. I promise to respond to these ones faster than I got around to the last batch.