Wide's World

Digital Pasties

by

Widearea

Porno-Graphix

Keep It Soft

Many situations demand that hardcore images not be employed in our adult websites and graphical elements. In many cases even the presence of pink qualifies as hardcore. To save the hassle of challenging the definition of hardcore, it is advisable to cover up those problem areas with what Wide's World would like to call the digital pasty. Before you feel the pain of the censorship, consider that when topless establishments began to spring up on main street, the gentlemen who frequented such establishments only turned their heads when a clothed female came into the room. This week we'll look at creating our own digital pasties to play by the rules and keep those surfers enticed enough to want to pay for the pink!

Use Your Tools

Photoshop has a nice set of existing brushes that can be used effectively to create censorship shapes that can work nicely for the cover ups we seek. If your image is small enough, creating a pasty may be as easy as selecting the right brush from the brushes pallette and clicking one time over the "problem area" with the paintbrush tool. Remember, to view the brushes pallette, select Window -> Show Brushes.

If you only see the basic brushes, simply choose Load Brushes... from the brushes pallette window pulldown menu on the pallette's upper right hand corner. When prompted, locate the additional brushes from the "Goodies" directory in your application folder. They should appear in the pallette as shown above. Then, simply select the brush of your choice from the brushes pallette, get hold of the brush tool from the toolbar, and click on the area you wish to cover. That's the easy method. Let's look at a basic method of creating the cover up that will allow us some creative flexibility.

Primitive pasties

1. Using the draw/paint program of your choice, create a new file and make a shape for your own custom pasty. A star shouldn't be too hard. Some applications offer simple tools to do so. In our example this week I made an 8-point star 1.25" x 1.25" in Illustrator. Save this file as "pasty.eps" as an .eps file.

2. Select File -> Open and locate the graphic file with which you have decided to censor for your own adult graphics project.
3. Select the Elliptical Marquee from the tools pallette toolbar on the uppermost top left. Click and hold to select the elliptical marquee.
4. With your image open, click and drag over the area that will be covered to create a round shape covering the sensitive area of the image.
5. Select Select -> Feather... to bring up the dialog box and enter a value for your feather.
6. Select Edit -> Fill and choose to fill the round shape with a previously selected foreground color.
7. Select File -> Open and locate the shape created in your paint program.
8. Drag the shape's layer from the layer pallette window onto your image's document window and position it over the feathered shape. It may be too large for your taste.
9. Select Edit -> Transform and select Scale from the pull down menu. Click and drag using the constraining points to scale the shape to a suitable size and reposition over the feathered censored area.
10. If your covering nipples, since most women have two of them, you will have to copy the existing element and position the copy over the other tit, or what have you. In the layers pallette window, select one layer of the pasty, and then click the linked layer box to the left of the unselected layer. Select Merge Linked from the layer pallete pulldown menu, then click the duplicate layer icon at the bottom of the layer pallette window to make your copy. Then ALT/OPTION click and drag to position the copied layer where it needs to go!

Our example today is rather rudimentary, but with a little ingenuity and practice, you can come up with your own failsafe method of making pasties that makes you as hot and horny as if you were seeing the real thing! Remember, softcore is your way of selling the real deal, and often it works damn good! If all things were revealed to us, where would be the mystery of enticement? Enjoy making pasties and as always, thanks for coming by Wide's World this week. Until next time, Happy Webmastering!

Reference/Useful Links

Interestingly enough, I was unable to get much information about the pasty itself, and as such I am not even sure of the spelling of the word, and I wonder if there is even a word for the singular noun form. The dictionary refers to the pasty as that which is glued and or sticky, so I would guess that's where the etymological development originates. A call to my local sex shop yielded nothing but a seemingly cute chick who has them in stock and not much else. But in keeping with the tradition, there is a band of musicians called the Pasties, so that's this week's link.

The Pasties - You might as well be naked.