@paddyfitz answered your question “Ever wondered what goes into a manip?”
Yes please
Shall do at some point, then! I did go back and look at my old manipping tutorials on and updated them a bit. There are three comprehensive ones here, here and here. Sadly, they don’t really have pictures (and I’m glad, because those links would be long dead now), but they’re mostly just lists of good rules of thumb. Photoshop’s evolved quite a bit since then (I wrote those in 2007-2008) and I’ve developed tons of new techniques and become far better than I was then, but a lot of it should still be valuable. For instance, I moaned a lot about overly painted styles because I’d overdone it myself earlier, and because everyone else was overdoing it as well (wanting to be the next Theban Band) at the time. And because the end result was often too mushy for many of the modern/futuristic fandoms like Doctor Who. Whereas now, of course, a painterly style and a romantic setting is something that ToB manips actually *need* in order to work. You can’t really throw Jaffar and the Princess under modern porn movie lighting, but have to darken the set with curtains made of old saris and stuff like that. (If you want awesome, high-res and beautiful fabric textures, I really can’t recommend eBay’s used sari shops enough, seriously.)
I haven’t ever done a blow-by-blow “how to make a manip” post before because of the amount of time and screenshots it’d take (I barely had time to go over some of that stuff really quickly during a convention workshop that took one hour). It’s a huge amount of work, so I can’t promise to do anything of the sort, but I’ll see what I can do about the piece-by-piece manip elements thing. One problem, of course, is that I wouldn’t want to ruin the suspension of disbelief on any existing manip, so it might take a while for me to find one to “sacrifice,” as it were:)
If there is any particular thing anyone was wondering about--as in, “Grouse, how in the hell do you do that”, I’d be glad to answer any questions of that sort as well?