A small faq on my giantess page July 5, 1998 Thanks for reading the FAQ. It would be nice to answer all of the mail, but I don't have much in the way of time these days and this seems to drop the email volume to acceptable levels.   Important note I'm starting all over again and moving the page to tripod. Soon a few new collages should make it on line.   Why do you do it? Why not? I have been interested in the concept for some time and enjoy playing with the tools.   Will you accept artwork or other material from others? No. In addition to barely having enough space for my own work, I don't want to offend people by using my own taste as a criteria for selection. The best policy for me is to feature only my own work. It turns out it is very easy and inexpensive to put your own pages on the Web. If you have something that you feel should be published, just make it so!   How long does it take to produce a collage? Anywhere from two to fifteen hours, although a few require considerably more time to polish.   How can I print them? Several people have written to say that they have satisfactory results printing with the 720dpi class of inkjet printers. I have tried printing on a low-end color inkjet (300dpi) and thought the output looked terrible. The Epson Color 800 printer is almost reasonable in the 1440 x 720 dpi mode on coated paper. Not quite photographic quality - but not bad from three feet away. The quality drops dramatically if you use normal paper or the lower quality print settings. The cost (for ink and coated paper) would run about $3 a page. More recently Epson has introduced an inexpensive 6 color printer called the Photo Stylus. It is only 720 dpi, but does a significantly better job on work like mine than the Color 800 (or any other sub $1000 printer I've seen). Again you need to use the fancy papers to get reasonable output and ink costs quite a bit. I have also tried a few prints on a high-end dye sublimation printer - a service bureau will charge about $15 a page. You might go through a few sheets getting the colors "right." This is one area where Apple's Color Sync technology is a big win if you want to minimize the trial runs.. Print quality was at least as good as the best magazines. Not cheap, but wow!   Can you post gif files rather than jpegs? Color photographs and collages generally look much better at 16 or more bits per pixel. Eight bit renditions of my work generally look terrible and a gif is eight bits (note that the thumbnails are gifs). If you are interested in looking a photos on a computer you should be using at least 16 bit graphics and preferably 24 bit. Jpegs are the only convenient way to display such images with my storage limitations. It is also true that most people would be unhappy with the download time associated with a 20MB original Photoshop file:-) Recently I have been playing around with drawings and collages that are somewhere between drawings and "photos." These are usually best represented by gifs as they tend to have a color space smaller than 256 colors.   Can you put more pictures on line? I have a small amount of storage on my current page and that is unlikely to change in the near future.   Is there an archive for your collages on the Internet? I don't know. Some of them have turned up in unusual places on the Internet and (so I'm told) in several zines.   Would you let me archive your collages? Please don't - many of them are of poor quality and it is best that they go away.   Can you make a collage using (suggested background or person) or a scene that (various suggestions for interaction between the background and/or people and the giantess(es) often involving sexual and/or fetish acts)? No - since I don't do this for money I have the luxury of being able to do what I want to do. If you want to see something with a different theme, I encourage you to do your own work and/or look at other sites on the Web. It has been my experience that the only work that is good is that which happens to be interesting to the artist. The stuff I do may or may not be good, but at least it is interesting to me as well as a learning experience.   Your pictures are too large (file size). Please put up something that downloads faster. I consider the collages that go on my page to be of minimal acceptable quality. Tightening up the jpeg compression and/or reducing the image size would drop the image quality below an acceptable level.   I have a fast connection to the Internet. Can you make your Photoshop masters available? No. I have limited space on this server and any single original would exceed that limit. I also have a tendency to throw them away after I have finished with the process. Even if I had unlimited space for this page I still wouldn't do it as my home link to the Internet is very slow - just a 28.8kb modem.   I want to make my own collages - can you tell me how to do it... Read the section on collaging. It isn't complete by any means, but it is a start. The important thing is to jump in and keep trying as it takes a bit of experience to get results. Make sure you have a reasonable program (like Photoshop) and a fast machine with a good deal of memory (I'm currently using a Macintosh 9500/250 G3 with 144 MB of RAM, but you can begin to learn the ropes with a much smaller machine). Now all you need is a source of images. If your machine won't cut it at this point I strongly encourage you to try freehand sketches. Even if they aren't good, fooling around with perspective, shadows and the like is fantastic training. It is important not to get discouraged. This type of work can take quite a bit of time and, until you develop an eye for picking out components, there will be many pieces that don't work out well. On the other hand, if they do work out well in the beginning you should probably consider doing this commercially!   Can I distribute your collages on a newsgroup or put them on my webpage or bulletin board system? Please don't. You are welcome to include a link to this page *IF* your own page is not sexual in nature (I suspect this is the source of most of the weird and/or sick email which may eventually force me to shut the page down). I would prefer not having unrestricted and/or misrepresented distribution.   Can I use them in a magazine or CDROM? No.   Did you like the Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman? If you mean the recent remake the answer is yes. It and a few other events precipitated my interest in creating my own collages. There were some great special effects in the movie (as well as a few that bombed). If you are interested in how to make movies with giantesses, (well beyond anything I will ever try) I recommend having a look at the March 1994 Cinefx magazine - they did a special issue on the special effects in the remake of the Attack of the 50ft Woman. Great stuff! These guys were very clever and worked on a very limited budget.   What is your favorite collage? In general I'm not very happy with any of them as they all have problems. The one I'm happiest with is jogger, even though it is technically poor. The one with the rollarblader was hideously difficult and is my favorite from the technical point of view. The empire state building satire was quite a bit of fun and has generated considerable fan mail from women. As you might imagine many of them suggest she should be carrying a gorilla.   I want to do a video (or movie). Do you have any comments? I have not worked with the tools and techniques required for movies. I will hazard an educated guess that it is (much) more difficult and expensive than the little things I do. Good luck with your efforts - I'm afraid I'll probably stick with what I know how to do. Look at Cinefx magazine for their comments on forced perspective and industrial strength rendering.   I would be interested in talking with the people who are emailing you. Is there any chance you could forward their messages or addresses? No - people have a right to their privacy.   I have found a great page -- can you publish a link to it on your page? Probably not. There are literally thousands of link lists out there and I didn't want to make another.   Which Photoshop books do you recommend? Like anything else, this game is largely practice (at least for me). I have looked through a few PS books and recommend Photoshop WOW. Probably the best way to learn PS is to play with it for awhile and then run through the exercises in a book to learn a few tricks. I also recommend the Kai tools. Although I rarely find them useful for making collages, they are incredibly cool and using them is great general training.   Macintrash users are totally cluless -- use Windows like real people! (I'm not kidding - this is a direct quote including the typos) I'm not interested in participating in the OS wars, but this platform works for me. You can probably do this work on any platform depending on your level of patience.   What about 3D work? This would require real artistic talent. I have played with Poser as well as Bryce and would imagine that the combination could be very powerful in the hands of a real artist. The current version of Bryce (3.0) can import 3D models, although it has large memory requirements (although not worse than Photoshop). If you have access to a powerful machine and have some talent I would imagine Strata Studio would allow you to do some nice work - particularly in combination with Bryce. There are some very nice 3D models to get started with, but none of this is cheap and if you don't know what you are doing it would be a complete waste of a large amount of money. One of these days someone is going to do something astonishing and blow all of us away.   Will you send me your homemade Photoshop plugins? No - that is part of the fun of doing this for a hobby and part of my style. If you really get into doing stuff like this you'll probably end up making your own and that will be part of your style. The stuff I write is very platform specific (it only works on 604 processors) and some of it actually has bugs:-)   What are the links on the bottom of your page? Sites that have listed me as a page/site of the day. (They have since been moved to a separate section as I slowly change the terrible page design...)   Why don't you show many muscular women? I really like muscular women myself. Unfortunately the images I have experimented with do not give the correct effect. I'm still looking and trying! I promise to spend some more time working with this. I also happen to like the look of models even though many of them are four sigma components of the population. Their unusual look often adds to the effect I'm after.   The colors look terrible on my monitor. I have seen this page on a Windows 3.1 box with a low end monitor and the colors were indeed terrible. The fact that the display only had 256 colors and Windows reserves something like 40 colors had a bit to do with the ugliness. Viewing results will be bad if you use the internal image views that come with Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. The results are particularly bad on the Windows versions of these products as they will attempt to dither to the 216 color "cube" that Windows allows in the 8 bit display mode. Any subtle detail will be lost and the colors (particularly skin tones) will be terrible. The Mac version of Navigator does marginally better, but the rule of thumb is that you are always better off with a reasonable external viewer. In fairness I have seen an enormous variation in image quality on Windows 95 boxes - from incredibly terrible to reasonable. You do need a high quality viewer to get the color fidelity, but color stability in the Windows world still leaves quite a bit to be desired. At the very least you need a high quality graphics card. It is no secret that different machines do different jobs of color mapping. I usually view my work on SGIs (an Octane) and Macs, which do very respectable jobs of color mapping. Another issue is gamma correction - Macs and SGIs are very similar here and I use the default Mac correction. Windows machines and Suns will be non-optimal unless corrected.   Can I do collaging with ... (usually Wintel machines and software I haven't used)? Probably - I'm very fond of the platform I use and have no reason to change, but I suspect you can do this with nearly anything. The person driving is probably a much larger piece than the platform anyway, but a fast processor, some memory and great software certainly don't hurt. You will need a great graphics card and an accurate monitor at the very least.   What, if any, formal training do you have? None. My Ph.D. is in physics and my last formal experience with art was in the eighth grade. The point is that anyone sufficiently motivated can probably do similar or better work.   Do you have a list of giantess books, movies and ads? No. A search on Alta Vista, Lycos or your favorite search engine should turn up notes by others if you're willing to hunt around. I thought it would be interesting to put up something on mythology and folklore, but finding information has been difficult and what exists is minimal.   What are your feelings on male vs female generated work on giantesses? I'm much more interested in the female side as it is expressing something very different than the more popular male generated work. It has been noted that most of the fanzine work is done by women these days and it is very easy to sort out male/female authoring - I think the same is true in this game. I am very interested in learning about women's reactions to these powerful beings and am even more interested in women written mythology on the subject. These comments aren't made to demean male generated art and words - I just note that most of what I've come across is male generated and I'd like to see more work from the other gender. Some very good stuff is being produced now, but it is very much underground probably for the same reason that nearly caused me to shut down a few times.   What about CorelDraw? I have tried several other tools (including CorelDraw) on several platforms and was left unimpressed. I have become accustomed to working in spaces other than rgb space (lab channels for example) and need Photoshop for doing things like this. This may be a reflection on learning curves and lack of experience on my part rather than the tools involved, but unless something comes along that allows me to wield magic I'll be sticking with Photoshop as that is where my investment is (money, experience and the work required to do necessary things like write plugins). Of course this doesn't mean that you can't do better work using something else.   Do you use programs with Photoshop? Yes - Painter from Fractal Designs is a nice drawing program that I like along with Expressionist from the same company. Great tools and I need a variety to get the job done. My main tool is still Photoshop 4.0 - these happen to be tools that fill in some of the gaps that Photoshop leaves.   I'm a model and am looking for some interesting exposure. Would you make a collage featuring me? Maybe. I can't guarantee anything as this is just a hobby. There are many important photographic parameters that must be satisfied and certain types of models work out much better than others. If you are really interested I would be happy to chat with you. Look at the model page. Female models only as I'm only interested in giantesses.   Why did you change your url? Like many other things, it boils down to money. I'm back to a place that doesn't force additional expenses.   What gamma correction do you use? 1.8 - this is standard on almost every Macintosh configuration (although you can reset it in Photoshop and other tools). SGIs are very close at 1.5, but they all have utilities to rewrite. If you have an SGI, adjust it to 1.8 for optimal viewing of my stuff. Suns and PCs generally don't have gamma correction so, by definition, they have a system gamma of 2.5. My stuff will look seriously wrong on these systems unless you can correct the gamma. One possible solution would be to use the PNG format. Unfortunately the compression isn't as high as a JPEG for "good enough" images and the resulting image files would be unacceptable for me (with my limited webspace) and any user who is forced to use anything slower than an unloaded T1. Would you comment on my artwork (or stories)? I would prefer not to as I don't enjoy offering critique. Additionally there is a size limit on my email space and if it is large it won't make it to me. Can you get me in touch with others who like the image of giant women? Certainly not directly. Recently the editor of a women oriented giant women group allowed me to print a copy of one of their monthly transcripts.