This is an entry from my old blog, so I’m actually able to write this in January of this year and set it up so it will be published in July. Years ago as I poked around the Internet looking for collage material, I found a website that belonged to a professional photographer. I can’t recall if s/he was Canadian, or was celebrating Canada, or had taken photos of a Canadian model, but what’s certain is that when I saved three images from that website, an idea was born.
I wanted to create an animated file to tell a story that celebrated Canada Day, and only (yeah, “only”) five months later I spotted the background during a collage background search; then I was ready to begin work.
It was grueling, as it involved dozens of layers in which the woman’s eyes moved from side to side, following the path of the little guy. I desperately tried to figure out a convincing way to create sand prints of his little feet, but in the end I had to give up on that, as my Photoshop skills were limited. I did learn some things from attempting to do that.
The shadows were maddening, but I finished the collage series before July 1rst, and created the animation to celebrate Canadian buddies in the giantess community: talented, creative people without whom we would not have some amazing collages to look at, or some of the best giantess and shrunken-men stories to read. They are simply great people that made my giantess board participation fun, back when I was having it, eh? Cheers!
I found these yesterday, and what woman wouldn’t love the idea of little ones in public service, protecting those things she needs throughout her daily life? This is a neat set of ads that also answers that age-old question: What careers would extremely small shrunken men be able to choose to earn a paycheck? Now we know.
If I had my own ad agency, this is the sort of ad I would be constantly compelled to churn out, and I would get paid the big bucks to do it. Now that would be a terrific, effortless way to earn a living!
B is for Brownies. I published this recipe at my old blog about eighteen months ago. I only have a few old ABC’s entries left to publish, and playing the game—even if only with myself—means I will be following the order of the letters of the alphabet from this point on, when I create new entries for this series.
I’d been planning to create a collage to accompany my brownie recipe for quite some time, but only after I found a suitable shrunken-man source image was I able to figure out the sort of photos I wanted to take of my brownies; so the image you see above is of my window, of a curtain I sewed years ago, and of brownies I baked. I think this is the first collage I’ve published that include raw images I created, instead of stealing downloading them from the Internet.
Underbrownies
7 T. butter
1 c. sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 c. cocoa
1/2 t. aluminum-free baking powder
1/4 t. sea salt
1/2 c. chopped, toasted walnuts
1. Heat oven to 350° degrees. If you have a toaster oven then you don’t have to heat up the entire kitchen to make these.
2. Grease and flour a small pan of any shape.
3. In food processor, combine butter and sugar until well mixed.
4. Add vanilla and mix until incorporated.
5. Add eggs and mix until well blended-
-Or add it all at the same time, for all I care. The result is the same when I blend it all lovingly and in order, than when I dump it all in the processor (I do recommend mixing the butter and sugar first), nuts last, and pour into pan.
6. Bake for about fifteen minutes. Don’t overbake, or you’ll end up making chocolate rock.
7. Cool, cut in sixteen pieces, and eat one with your sweetie before you kiss him/her. Brownie breath is a guaranteed shrinking potion. It only works on men, of course.
If I receive one single philistine comment about how baking is women’s work, I’ll crush ya like a twig and snap ya like a bug.
* * *
As I chose the elements for the collage above, a scene played in my head. Some will understand when I tell you that events between a shrunken man and a woman don’t always have to include sexual activities. Daily routine can become their prelude, and activities such as visiting, making friends, listening to music, cleaning the house, etc., can lay the foundation for an emotional state ripe with the right kind of tension.
In this case, the emotion I use to color interaction is a deep sense of trust combined with size-related frustration. A man that shrinks to a mere few inches in height will remember a time his wife might have baked him brownies, and he would have polished the entire plate as he watched TV, later burning those calories in the yard, or in the bedroom.
He will recall there was a time he could have closed his hand around his wife’s delicate wrist when the doorbell rang announcing relatively unwanted visitors, and he could have pulled her into his arms as he whispered, “Let’s pretend we are not home, and maybe they’ll go away….”
There is a weight pressing on him that has nothing to do with his wife’s finger or toe; a heavy feeling of helplessness as he watches his life shrink and be absorbed by his mate’s actions. The only thing that rescues him from despair is the absolute trust he feels in his beloved. It carries him as safely as her hand during moments when it seems even the air he breathes is something she allows him to have, and can take away if she so desired it; those times when his responses to disappointment regress to a child-like state; those instances when events slip away as he’s shown a shrunken man may control only that ever-changing sphere the woman that loves him declares his province; those times such as these….
“They are mine,” he said, his hips pressing possessively against the brownie closest to his hips, the one sandwiched in the middle of the stack. That tiny thrust was almost imperceptible given his size, and he seemed too angry to have meant it to be seductive, but his naked body was glued to those baked goods as though they were some sort of salvation; and that moist, warm brownie molded like clay to the shape of his body sent her thoughts adrift to other times he had moved similarly against her body.
“Honey, I can bake you more brownies after they leave, ” she said placatingly. She could see wet chocolate stains beginning to spread onto his torso and his delicious thighs, and forced herself to look away from his midriff, up to his chocolate-colored eyes. He looked good enough to eat, and he would probably taste delicious at the moment, but that sort of fun would have to wait until they were alone in the house again.
She looked over her shoulder at the bedroom door, and listened to her friends chatting in the living room. Again his voice, as diminished in volume as it now was, seemed to somehow get louder. She faced him again as he stood next to the brownies on the plate.
“I don’t want different brownies later; I want these, and I want them now!” his words ended with the whine of a child threatened by willpower much greater than his own. “You baked them for me. I’ve been waiting for you to bake me these brownies for weeks! You are going to have to give them something else to eat.” He stretched his arm along the edge of the top brownie, and his little fingers clasped it greedily. They hadn’t been out of the oven very long, but he didn’t seem to mind their warmth.
“Unfortunately I can’t help the whole house smelling like them, darling. If I had known they were coming I would have baked a double batch. Sweetie, be reasonable! You are too small to eat them all anyway! One of these little squares would last you a month- alright, a week, the way you eat sometimes.” She threw him a playful smile, but he didn’t return it.
“They should have called you first, before butting in and interrupting our weekend!”
Beginning to feel a touch of annoyance, she sighed, and watched his hair be blown back by gust of wind she had created. “Sweetie, this is the South. People don’t do that. They expect to be able to drop by casually and be served iced tea and comfort food in an impeccable home. They expect impromptu politeness, and hospitality at the drop of a hat.”
“But you are Hispanic. They can’t expect you to behave that way.” He realized immediately he had put his little foot in his mouth when her lips tightened, and when he spoke again, his voice was little more than a squeak.
“Tell them they can’t have-”
“What do you mean ‘they can’t expect me to behave that way’? And do you see me doing that? Do you really think I’m going to go back out there and tell them ‘Sorry ladies, my tiny shrunken husband is a greedy, selfish baby, and he refuses to yield even a single brownie square. We’ll have to scavenge the fridge for any leftover Chinese food that hasn’t turned, and whatever cheese we can slice away from mold we can put on Ritz crackers.”
His gaze, no longer blazing with anger, dropped for a moment.
“Well, er… um-” He shook his head softly, sinking his chin into the brownie corner the heat of his body had rounded out. His fingers dug into the still warm mass of chocolate like fish hooks, as though he could still prevent her from taking the plate away from him.
“I’m offering my friends these brownies, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. They will stay in my house for as long as they wish, and they they will eat anything they want from my fridge. And after they leave I’ll come back here and we’ll have a long conversation about your manners, and your small place in the grand scheme of my things.”
She reached for the plate, and he barely had time to jump off it and onto the bedside table where the stack- his stack of brownies had been cooling off. His pressed lips turned into a pout as he watched her walk away with them in hand.
Only now did he begin to realize there might not be any sort of sweetness headed his way this Saturday night if he didn’t work his way to her good graces. He looked down at his body. Almost the entire front of it was painted brown with melted brownie marks. He thought they could be useful.
Careful not to accidentally wipe clean any of it, he sat on the lamp base. In the distance, in the living room that felt as though it was a town away, he could hear laughter and womanly conversation, interrupted by moans of culinary appreciation as his wife’s friends devoured his brownies.
Alone, he waited.
* * *
And here’s the example file, the way I initially composed the image. There isn’t that much difference between the former and the latter.
1. The female presence is sorely lacking. What’s the meaning of that, Samsung people? Don’t you know I now begin to feel the want for an MP3 player, and because you didn’t have the foresight to include a womanly ear in which to place your little guys, I will dream of spending my money on a different brand? Agonize over that.
2. The uninteresting match between listener and music. Only a well-dressed guy listens to opera; the man with the inverted cap and bling must certainly be listening to rap, and the cliché sideburns belong to the Elvis fan. Boring, and absurd. Again, Samsung, weep as I plan to spend vast amounts of money on another player.
3. The little performers are slightly amorphous, with large heads that reach within the realm of caricature. Don’t you Samsung fellas realize that a well-proportioned little man would have done wonders to facilitate my fetishist thoughts desire to try your product?
Still, these ads are appointing in that they do show little guys thrusting their tiny heads into much larger orifices. Behold the great stretching of my imagination as I unfold it like a carpet upon the wasteland of their advertising failure.
* * *
Advertising Agency: Cheil Worldwide, Seoul, Korea
Creative Director: Joungrack Lee
Art Director: Jaewon Choi
Photographer: Junghoe Kim
Published: February 2008
I found these ads at Ads of the World as I have found others. While the existence of an ad doesn’t mean it was ever put to publicity use, it’s still nice to see that in many places there are creative people thinking about these things, and seeing potential in the visual message of size differences.
* * *
Advertising Agency: Storåkers McCann, Stockholm, Sweden
Art Directors / Copywriters: Jonas Frank, Sofia Ekelund
Photographer: Petrus Olsson, Adamsky
Published: April 2009
A few days ago there was a tiny black ant creeping on my DVD player’s remote control. I had placed the latter next to my keyboard when I spotted the little thing carrying a crumb. I don’t know what came over me, but I decided to flick it off to the floor. I did, but all I accomplished was to wrench the crumb from its grip.
I sat here, looking down at this insect which stood in exactly the same spot after my giant finger had slashed the air before it, and I realized I had only moved it close enough to take away its food. My mind, being what it is, had a lovely time picturing a shrunken man standing there, dumbfounded, after I do the very same thing to his food.
“Hey! What did you do that for?”
“I’ve told you before, dear: no food near the Mac.”
“But it was just a little crumb! I was gonna sit here on the remote, and watch you work while I ate my snack.”
“Rules are rules, little one.”
“But you could have hurt me! Your finger almost hit me! What if it had been me flying off the edge of the desk, and not my crumb?”
“I didn’t hit you.”
“You could have missed!”
“I never miss.”
“But-
And then he gives up, because I’ve already resumed my typing, my mind drifting to giant thoughts. He knows the power of accuracy, of physical dexterity when dealing with small objects is like a drug to me, and displaying it to him, making him feel how much taller I am than him with the simplicity of a finger speeding past him like a bus gives me such a high.
Sigh. Back to reality, I did experience an exquisite buzz when I saw what I had done, and imagined the above. And typed the above. And imagined typing the above. And….
What? You know you thought about it too. Bring us the size-different claymation porn, film industry!
I’ll be back later to delete these terribly crass words and compose a sensible message. In the meantime, call your mother.
(A week later…)
As it turns out, I won’t be deleting any words from the above; otherwise Trinket’s evil cackle in the comment section won’t make any sense.
For weeks this day visited my mind as I wondered what sort of entry belonged here on Mother’s Day. I mean, who in their right mind would attempt to establish a connection between motherhood and the giantess (or shrinking) fetish? What sort of abominable direction would thoughts have to take to direct a man to the sort of situation that reduces him to the size of a small child; that shrinks his abilities to the scope of a baby’s; that threatens to take away his manly manhood until he’s nothing but a fragile bundle of flailing arms and legs in the hand of a woman?
Don’t play coy. I saw that look on your face.
What?
You’ve never thought of such a thing? You don’t know what I’m talking about? I got some ’splainin’ to do?
Nothing simpler. The relationship between a man and a much taller woman comes in many sizes, and they don’t always have to do with height. Sizes can have to do with emotions, maturity, physicality, etc., and the perception of them, whether it’s enforced or volunteered. There has never been a blurrier line between having no choice but to experience something and offering to do so, than in these fantasies.
In other words, if a woman wakes up one morning and smiles at the little bundle of joy still sleeping next to her, and she decides that tiny pile of hairy limbs that also comes with morning breath and face bristles is going to play baby that day, there is nothing that shrunken man can do about it. Gone are his pants, to be replaced by a diaper she will probably insist he uses; absent are his meals, and instead he’s obliged to struggle in the folds of a baby blanket, and to open his small mouth to accept whatever food she decides he needs; disappeared is the dollhouse and all its accoutrements, replaced by a crib, or a baby pen; and so on.
Why are these terrible things happening to this perfectly mature little guy? What possesses his lovely lady to forget his age, the years he was allowed to spend in school, his ability to speak? Why does he struggle in her grip, and fight her every move with all the strength he has, knowing full well all his efforts are in vain? I don’t know. Don’t ask me, I only blog here.
I found a set of Harvey Nichols ads that utilize Wallace & Gromit characters, and I was left with no choice but to alter them. When I watched The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit DVD extras, they included footage of the tiny village in which the claymation characters interacted. Guess the sort of things I was thinking then.
If I worked in the film industry, and got to erect those small towns, with all those little streets and buildings, I’d come to the stage late at night with my camera and film myself interacting with the miniatures. I’d be fired the next morning when my DNA is found all over them, and it would all come out after I become a famous author, completely ruining my chances to publish children’s books… or maybe improving them.
While watching the movie I had some thoughts about a tiny Wallace interacting with Lady Tottington. They could not be helped, which is less than I can say about her hair. I transformed her into a brunette, and decided it would make for a nice greeting card.
This is old, nearly five years old. How time flies.
E is for Elusive, which is what my tiny man becomes when I call him to me, because it’s time to get to work. Sometimes I need him to sharpen my drawing pencils with his tiny whittling knife, others it is my shoes that need polishing or light repair. Whatever the case, he flees and disappears into the dollhouse, whence he peers out at me through a tiny pane, awaiting for discovery while I begin to arch my brow in annoyance. Where is he!?
I voice my displeasure to the vast emptiness of my room, the vellus on my neck standing on end as I suddenly feel a tiny pair of eyes on me. I smile secretly, now sure of his location, without needing to look. I trick him, swerving my head to the right (and away from where his dollhouse sits in prominent location), pointedly tilting it towards the floor as though I’m looking for him, pretending I’m scanning every inch of that side of the room for his scurrying body. I’m not; I know where he is.
I swivel in place, still away from the dollhouse, my office chair creaking exaggeratedly at his ears, a warning symphony that lets him know his time is running out… that soon I will meet his eyes with mine, that I will stand away from that monument of metal and fabric, forcing those diminutive slits up the length of me, and that I will unleash my feet in his direction, shrinking the distance between us, giving him a second or two to come to grips with facing MINE.
These ads are glorious. I’m not sure if “Soho” is the brand or the distributor, and the website doesn’t make it any clearer; nor do Internet search results that show either possibility could be the answer.
Soho Lab sandals
There’s a Soho Lab brand of shoes, a Skechers offspring, and any fool can see they are not as high-quality as the heels in the ads. My momma didn’t raise no fool, though for $50.00 a pair of Soho Lab sandals doesn’t exactly make me feel nauseated.
Back to the ads, and the reason I created an entry for them: It’s about being tall enough to walk in the clouds. Have you ever been up there? So high up a mountain clouds swirl and shift like great veils all around you? When I was a child I visited places that put me there. I’d get out of the car and look down the side of the road, seeing nothing but a thick blanket of graying white hiding the plummeting distance to the ground below.
I’ve never been afraid of heights, much to my parents’ occasional chagrin. It’s something slightly less than a miracle that the things I did back then to get that rush of height didn’t get me killed… but as someone with an inner giantess, I can’t help but enjoy the visual treat of what would be a fatal trek to the ground.
Biondini high heels
I have wanted to collage images like these ads, except mine would have shown legs from the ankles up.
Back to shoes! Because of my great command of the German language (read: Google translator) I was able to ascertain that the Soho website promotes various brands of shoes, among them Biondini. I want them. I want these pavement crackers. I just need to move to Europe, where most of the beautiful shoes live.
I know it’s much too soon to end this thrilling shoe discussion, but the time has come to do so. I will leave with one last thought: Be very grateful I’m not a real giantess, for if I was, I’m afraid that as kind and gentle as I would be most of the time, I would commandeer legions of workers to build colossal shoes for my feet.
* * *
Advertising Agency: Wirz/BBDO, Switzerland
Creative Director: Matthias Freuler
Art Directors: Kim Sokola, Rahel Boesinger
Photographer: www.svengermann.ch
Retoucher: Daniel Bracher
The two images that accompany this entry are extremely low-res, and for a reason. Back when I had the old blog at Giantess.com, there was a series of entries I began to develop titled, “Adventures in collaging”.
In the two that I was able to post I discussed a couple of collaging aspects: splashes (as in those produced by the feet of a massive giantess), and shadows, lighting and reflections. I thought I’d enjoy doing the same thing at this blog, and from time to time discussing different things about what I consider the incredible waste of time of my choice, collaging.
The reasons these two images are of such low quality and only of medium size is because they are “example” files. The first thing you do when you collage giantesses and shrunken men is acquire material. For the most part this material is saved from the Internet, which makes this first thing an extremely easy task.
What I do next is group material in folders that end up containing the layered Photoshop file, the raw materials, and the final jpg. There’s one last image that has become part of my standard operating procedure when collaging, and it’s the example file. When I’m pairing raw material, I do it with Photoshop, and not with the naked eye, and when I’m done pairing raw material, the resulting image is reduced in size, named Example, and saved.
It’s a very quick, rough version of what I imagine the final image will look like. There are pixels leftover, mismatched skin tones, wrong shadows, etc., but the purpose of the example file is to allow me to see the potential of the raw materials, and the amount of work I will have to do to get it to look good in the end.
It helps me, because sometimes I decide the end result is not worth the effort. Another thing it does is allow me to recall what the heck it is that I wanted to do with that raw material in the first place. I forget sometimes. In the past I’ve opened a folder months after saving it, and it’s happened a few times that I have no idea what I was thinking when I downloaded its contents.
Sure, it’s not really difficult to puzzle it out, but an example file makes for a time-saving template. Simple, and effective.
