Social Media on Parade! Stickboy wins...himself?

So it's going slower than I'd liked but I finally was able to update the main image on the College Follies Google+ main page so that someone actually got a doll. I plan to switch it up every month or so with different dolls and maybe different characters playing. It's a little touch, but I smile every time I scroll up to see Stickboy looking at me with that bewildered look. It's the little things in life...

Social Media on Parade: The Arcade Guys on Google+

Hey, looks like those guys from page seven took the Space Chicken Massacre game right past the claw machine in my Google+ image. This is my first update on that image. Like I said, I'll have some dolls getting plucked up in there from time to time. Hopefully, it'll be something different every month, so stay tuned! 

Social Media on Parade: My Google+

I thought I was done with Social Media on Parade, but I was looking at my personal Google+ page and recalled how much I liked the image, so I thought I'd share it on here. It's from the same photo shoot as my Youtube image and Twitter background. It's a nice mix of promotional and comic art and past and present works mixed together.

I also want to say how much I'm enjoying Google+. I'm having a strange amount of difficulty connecting with people and getting "likes" on the College Follies Facebook page but I'm doing amazingly well on the series' Google+ page. The interface honestly makes it a lot easier to post things, connect with like-minded people and just find cool posts to comment on. I just wish more people were on there, but if you are, please check me out. I appreciate all the pluses and followers!

Social Media on Parade: A logo by any other name...

So we close out our look at the current art on College Follies' social media sites with a look at what acts as my avatar on almost every site: my publishing logo.

 

When the comic series is published, I'll need a company name for the studio putting it out.  I'm going with the name CF Comics. It's a studio that currently exists at my kitchen table and only has one unpaid employee (me), but you got to start somewhere.

 

Obviously, CF stands for College Follies. As much as I enjoyed reading Tyrant by Spiderbaby Grafix back in the 90s or Accelerators by Blue Juice Comics currently, it's hard to remember the company names when they don't have much to do with the comics. So hopefully CF Comics will help people find it, even if they can only remember the comic begins with a "C." It's a theory, at least.

 

I plan to use a logo as a picture box in the corner for future comics (starting with the second issue) featuring a character inside the logo (currently, my main character Stickboy):

 

 

This is, of course, inspired by the old corner box logos Marvel used to do on its comics in the 1980s. The logo is a digital cutout laid over an image of Stickboy, so it gives me the freedom to switch out the character at the bottom at any time. I created the CF letters myself in Photoshop, carving a "C" out of a circle and the "F" out of a rectangle.

 

Unfortunately, shrinking it down to the size of a website avatar made it too small to be effective. So for my online logo, I'm going with a version I colored in for the Dark Knight Returns parody image I did. It looks nice, I like that shade of blue. And it's a lot easier to fit in the tiny space most sites provide for avatars than a face shot of a character would be.

 

So there you have it, everything you ever wanted to know about the current main images on the various College Follies pages around the net! Come back tomorrow for more artwork from my endless bag of cool stuff!

 

Social Media on Parade: There's no tube like a YouTube...

YouTube! Somewhere between the videos of kittens nodding off and Mitt Romney dancing Gangnam Style is a channel for College Follies! I've only got one video so far, an introduction to this blog, but more will be coming. I'll be posting videos on how I make the comic and other fun stuff along the way, so be sure to subscribe to the channel.

Putting art on a YouTube channel...well, let's just say it's complicated. You remember how Google+ initially shows the bottom of your image to browsers who visit your site? Well, YouTube will only show a small slither in the very center to visitors.... or at least the ones on the internet. It'll show a different slither to mobile users and the whole image to those seeing it on their TV.

So to find an image that would look good  no matter what, I used a picture from a photo shoot  I did of pages I'd drawn or inked with art supplies and/or other images I'd made laid on top of them. These photos are used for the background for this blog and the College Follies Twitter page. I was able to find one that would make sense when viewed only as a middle slither (you could actually see characters' faces, tell what was going in the panels, etc.). And you can also see the pen and pencil on top of the pages that just screams "comic creation" to me.

Incidentally, the inked pages shown are from the story I'm touching up, lettering  and coloring currently (though they are a few pages farther than what I've gotten to so far). The penciled one in the middle is from a incomplete story I drew in 2000, which will be the second College Follies story. How's that for a tease?

Social Media on Parade: Twitter in about 140 Characters...

Here's the header for the @CollegeFollies Twitter page. As you can see, it's taken from the first cover. And that's 139 characters. See ya.

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...

Social Media on Parade: Facebook Returns

Huh? What? Didn't I do Facebook already? Well I did the College Follies Facebook page a few days ago (facebook.com/collegefollies, for the love of God, please like it!). Today I'm going to look at my personal Facebook page art. Why? Because I like it, that's why.

Anyway here it is:

So this image has a bit of history. The one issue that was printed back in 2000 (that I'm restoring and coloring for the web currently) has my heroes, Stickboy and Psychoboy, in trench coats. Since those were damn fine trench coats they were wearing, I had to do a Frank Miller parody image.

Now Miller is the legendary writer/artist known for Sin City, a crime noir comic series (and later a movie) in which everyone wears trench coats. He's also known for doing Batman: The Dark Knight Returns with the famous cover of lightening striking in the background of a silhouetted Batman.

So I did an image where I modeled the characters after the position Robin was in as she jumped through the air in one of the splash pages in Dark Knight. I put them in trench coats and made them silhouetted in front of lightening and voila:

That was back in 1999. Recently, I thought about coloring the image and using it as a "College Follies Returns" image. But then it occurred to me, if you're going to do a parody you can't just jam random elements of someone's work together, you should refer directly, precisely to what you're satirizing. Thus I drew a new image, this time with Psycho and Stick taking the position that Batman took on the cover of the first issue of Dark Knight (one of the most famous comic covers of all time). I drew lighting that was fairly close to the cover too.

Then I scanned in the image and knocked out the background. I colored the background layer with a Photoshop airbrush set to a gargantuan size, trying to emulate the colors Lynn Varley used on the cover. I then used the airbrush (at finer size) to create a glow around the lightening on that background layer and then erased the inked lines above it and boom! Stick and Psycho are ready to take on the Reagan administration!

Though it is a promotional image, it would make a damn fine cover and, after doing it, I came up with a story for it. It would probably be a full length issue, so it's a bit longer than the stories I want to do, at least for right now. But eventually, who knows? Every comic has to end up in a possible dystopian  future at some point...

Social Media on Parade: Facebook photobombing

In the time between finishing pages for the comic, I'll be posting various bits of art I've done related to the comic. So I thought I'd do a series of posts on the new art I had to create for each College Follies social media site.

We'll start with Facebook. The 500 pound gorilla of the internet. The social network Mark Zuckerburg started to get back at an ex-girlfriend (hey, if Aaron Sorkin wrote it in a screenplay, it must be true).

So this is the image on facebook.com/collegefollies:

It originally started out as art for my YouTube channel with my main character Stickboy trying to get himself and his girlfriend Kinkygirl on tape, with his pals Psychoboy and Bigirl jumping in to get in on the video. When I discovered I completely misunderstood how YouTube channel art worked, I had to go with something else for my channel art.

The image was reworked for Facebook and became Stickboy taking a photo of him and Kinkygirl with Psychoboy and Bigirl photobombing him. All the characters pictured have appeared in various bits of art I've done for College Follies since I first drew the series in 1999, except Kinkygirl. It's her first time being drawn for the series...well sorta.

Kinky is based on my ex-girlfriend who became my ex-wife. During our eight relationship, I would draw Kinky on homemade cards I would give her and even in a little book I drew for her as a gift. When we divorced, she obviously kept all the cards and the book I made for her. For whatever reason, I never made copies or photos of any of it. I didn't keep any sketches or designs I did for the character (if any existed, I may have just drawn her directly on the page).

So other than Stickboy himself, I've actually drawn Kinky more than any other College Follies character. Yet I don't have any references for her other than a single published image of her that was done for a political cartoon in my school newspaper (and that was at an odd angle, so I couldn't tell how I did the shape of the face).

So I was pretty much coming up with the design for her as I did the Facebook image, I think it came out decent, though I may do some tweaking on it in the future. It's good to see her character in a proper image for the series. Stickboy, like everyone else, deserves some love.