Come With Me If You Want to Draw
Welcome to Killer Robot Comics, Design and Illustration Version 3.0! I’ve spent quite a bit of time creating this, and I hope you enjoy visiting and reading through it as I did making it. For the past 8 months, I’ve been fine-tuning my WordPress ninja skills and this site is the fruit of that labor.
Let me tell you a little bit about what I’ve made here. This site is the home of my personal and art blog, my portfolio and soon to be the hub of all my projects and creations. The entire site is hard-coded from scratch by me, using the most basic possible WordPress framework as a starting point. It was made using a truckload of CSS, PHP and whatever help I could find in order to make my creation come to life.
With a little help from DOMTab for some Java in the sidebar, and IconDock for the free social icons, I have made what I think is the perfect home for Killer Robot. I know there are some things I want to add and change already — things that came up during production that I moved to 3.1 — but I think this is a cool starting point to show a lot of what I can do.
So please take a look around, try things out, comment on posts, and let me know if you think of anything you’d like to see added for ease of use, or if you see something that is borked pretty bad. Also, for the three of you that have subscribed to my RSS feed, you might need to update it.
And for everyone’s sake, please ignore the CSS behind the curtain. The file is a little messy and something to be cleaned up in a future update.
Thanks for reading!
New Website: It’s Coming
Finally my home page is actually accurate! I really am working on a new website design. Currently, it’s in the early development stages (i.e. moving things around in Photoshop) but now that I have a plan and a timeline, I hope to have something new up around the first of the year.
Until this is done, I won’t really be posting anything new here — even though it’s been quite a while since my last post anyway — but once the new theme and site are live, I plan on coming back with more posts, more updates and more artwork to share with you guys.
While I’m working on the site, you can follow me on Twitter to get my latest updates and thoughts, and even if my new site can’t throw knives into heaven or dip ladies’ hands into acid, like George Washington, the new website is coming.
To leave you with something opinionated — it is a blog after all — here are some micro reviews of things I would normally post about:
Bionic Commando (Xbox 360): An incredibly fun and enjoyable rental even if the story is about as captivating as an empty trash can.
Iron Man (Netflix): One of the better comic book movies. The writers got the characters right, the designs right and the story was solid. The only thing missing was a more convincing bad guy.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine: As I’m trying to talk myself into X-Men Movie-verse Deadpool, I can’t help but be bothered by the fact that there was a complete lack of blood in this movie. A group of mutants killing people with claws, swords, guns and everything else, and no blood to be found.
I’m Making This Up As I Go Along
Well it’s been far too long since my last post. Even though I’ve been very busy — with art and non-art projects — I haven’t really done anything worth posting here. I started a personal blog where I can share a little more about my life and interests that aren’t related to art, and I seem to update that page more often than this one. That shows me that I’ve neglected my artwork for far too long. And that needs to change. Now.
At my current job, I’m in the process of learning how to develop websites in the WordPress environment (Hey, this site was made in WordPress!), as well as dabbling in some PHP programming. I learned a little C++ in college and I’ve taught myself quite a bit of ActionScript, so the PHP thing has been a lot of fun to learn. I even ordered a book to teach myself some more of it in the form of a catalog project.
What does this mean for Killer Robot? Well, since I’ve already learned a buttload about WordPress in just my first couple of weeks, it means a new website design is coming. I’ve learned a lot about manipulating template files and source code, so I want to take a stab at creating a WordPress template from scratch. It’s going to be a lot of work — which will include a new logo, color scheme and branding as well. I’ve only had this site for a little over a year and it’s incredible the amount of knowledge you can absorb in such a short amount of time.
On top of the new website, I’ve been honing my sketching technique, as well as fine-tuning my process of going from sketch to final product. With these things in place, I’m starting over on the Zabka comic — even though there has only been one page so far — and looking to begin my Human Element story as a webcomic that will be integrated into this site. I also have a few side projects in the works, including but not limited to:
- Logo and website for my wife Laura’s business
- Logo character for a friend’s website
- A birthday card design for my grandfather’s 80th birthday
- A new self-portrait
- Something involving the otter holding the Idol from Raiders Of The Lost Ark (see above)
There’s a lot to be done in the coming months, and I feel like I’ve spent too much time dawdling in laziness and excuses. It’s time to get focused, and hopefully because I wrote it here for others to read, I’ll get serious about it. I want to make a schedule with due dates to keep everything on track, and I hope to share all this with you. Here’s to an eventful eight months of 2009!