An Afternoon at the Courts

I'd been down to the basketball courts just once before. My sister Tara plays ball there regularly, but that time I went, just to hang out and see what it's like you know, she was out of town for a state championship game. She's out of town often, see. She plays both basketball and baseball for her school, and this year she's gonna make All-State. She's always going out of town for games. So I went just once, cos I know if she caught me there, she'd belt me so hard I wouldn't be able to sit for a month. I didn't tell any of my brothers either, especially not Doug, cos he'd snitch on me for sure. There's always one in every family.

Timo goes though, pretty regularly. He goes he says, to flirt with the girls. It's a scene there, he says. If you wanna get with girls, he says, that's the best place to go.

Further Adventures in Advertising

Update: Replaced the image with a new one fixing some minor shading and masking problems that I'd overlooked. February 14, 2008.

I first made this collage after I spotted the original source image, which was just begging me to try to do something with it. I mean, seriously, an attractive, athletic, woman, teeing off on a golf-ball resting on a man's puckered-up lips? How could someone like me possibly resist. The source image was challenging to work with though, mostly because the man's legs were actually not in the frame and I had to cobble them together using a combination of copied sections from visible parts of his pants, and shoes from some other image. I also had to figure out some way of filling in the background sections that were obscured by the original man's body and also to make shadows and lit areas on the ground conform to his new size. All of this, of course, compounded by the fact that I had just started collaging, and was really just blundering around.

I learned a lot making this image. I also swore a lot.

I've returned to it quite a few times since. My first fix was to make the man smaller, to be more consistent in this world. In an initial spate of laziness, I'd only shrunk him down to about four and a half feet tall because I wanted to avoid large areas of empty space to have to fill in. Thankfully, I'd come back to this image after more than a year of collaging experience. More recently, I've modified the woman to make her appear taller and more muscular. I also thought it would be more fun if the image was an actual advertisement, you know, one of those amusingly risqué and chauvinistic ad campaigns that occasionally cause an uproar in your world.

Not as much uproar in this world though, except from a small number of unattractive, yet extremely vocal men who would shut up if they could just get laid every now and again.

A Question of Scale

In my earlier work, I really didn't pay that much attention to relative scale. In other words, I'd throw men and women together into a collage without measuring properly what ratio of sizes they would have. I started becoming a lot stricter when I became serious about portraying an alternate universe where women are the taller and stronger sex. I've been going back and fixing the scales in all my old images worth keeping and posting.

The scale I usually chose for my earlier work was a very vaguely-defined half-height. There were a few reasons behind this. Part of the inspiration for my fantasy world was based on a story by CLH titled After the Apple Fell. In it, an unexplained worldwide phenomenon occurs during the turn of the millennium, causing all males to eventually shrink to half their previous height. The story is about a day in the life of.... Aw hell, just go read it yourself. CLH is a fabulous writer, creates wonderful and memorable characters, and infuses his stories with a warm sense of humor. I only wish there were more of them to go around.

Anyway, this scale appealed to me because even the tallest and strongest man would be weaker than the smallest fully-grown woman. I felt it was a good basis for me to work with visually. Of course, in my world, there was never a cataclysmic change and it's always been like this. Here, the female of the species are generally larger, and, according to trinket999ism, human evolution favored taller, more athletic women – the better to protect helpless men against such predatory menaces as saber-toothed tigers and the like – who in their turn, preferred smaller men who were easier to drag back to their caves for some convenient selective reason that I haven't bothered to work out. Evolutionary pressure thus led to this extreme sexual dimorphism.

In modern times, most boys are attracted to strong, athletic women who excel in physical activity, because it's just hardwired into their genes (and if one ain't, he's one of them weird boys and he ain't never gonna find himself a good woman). Women in this world are taller than in ours, with more upper-body development and lankier builds. I scaled our b-baller from my original collage to make her appear taller (using the basketball as a size hint) – around 6'8" – and modified her body proportions to have broader shoulders and longer legs appropriate for her height; the boys are around 3'6". At that height, she's a star on her college ball team, and boys are of course, literally throwing themselves at her everywhere she goes, even when she's not showing off for them.