Social Media on Parade: Try your luck at Google+

Start hanging out with your circles, it's Google+ time! Ah, Google+, the home of social arithmetic. It's Facebook for people who hate Facebook. And College Follies has a storefront page on there with this bit of nifty main art:

The dolls highlighted at the bottom (left to right): Stickboy, Psychoboy, Bigirl and Dino.

Now let me say that Google+ has a...unique set up. You put a main image on there like any other site, but when people go to your page they only see the very bottom of it, which runs across the top of your profile. They can scroll up to see the image or they may just keep going on your profile, only seeing the bottom slither of it.

See my problem?

So if I put a regular image on there, it really wouldn't mean much to the folks who don't scroll up. If I posted full body shots of my character, they'd only see the feet. If I posted a close up of their face, browsers would only see their chins.

But if you put an image that only the bottom fifth of it is supposed to be seen, what do you do with the rest? I mean, I could do an image with Stickboy's  head at the very bottom that would fit in the slither that greets viewers on the page, but what if they scroll up? What would go above Stickboy? An air show? X-Wings making a Death Star run?

So I tried to think of an image that could be viewed both ways: as a whole image and as just the bottom fifth. A claw machine came to mind for some reason, filled with dolls based on my characters. I went with Stickboy (my protagonist), Bigirl (his closest on-campus friend), Psychoboy (his best bud),  and Dino (his ex-girlfriend). Stick and Psycho star in the first story, Bigirl I'd drawn for promotional art back in 2000 and Dino is the star of the second College Follies story which currently exists as almost complete pencils (also done back in 2000) so all of them I had drawn before and had concrete designs on.

The idea is that all the dolls have a uniform body that the manufacturers then put the clothes and features on. I did an outline of one doll and traced it to create the four you see. Then I used Photoshop to multiply them like crazy and dropped a photo of a brick wall in the background. Looking at it now, I sorta want to try doing another claw machine image completely by hand. Maybe when I get more characters designed to fill it up with.

One thing I plan to do is to have the claw actually grab a doll from time to time, so you never know how else might end up in that claw machine...