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.
The First In the Hope of Many
As you can see, very quickly after I launched version 2.0 of this site, 2.1 is already live. I figured that since I design websites for a living, I should probably spend a little more time on my personal website’s design.
I went in and cleaned up all of the code, most of which was simply deleting tags in the CSS that I hid instead of removing. I also designed my own custom header in CSS, and custom email, rss and home buttons for the site as well. I haven’t learned as much about PHP in this process as I would have hoped, but I have cemented my knowledge of CSS usage and I’m very excited that this looks the way it does and I coded it correctly in addition to designing something for myself that I actually like. And doing that is quite a challenge in itself. I usually hate everything I design for my own use.
I even accomplished the subtle art of making the site look the same in IE, Firefox and Safari, and that makes me extatic. I hope to be done for a while. I like the feel of this site, I’m happy looking at it, and I feel a huge sense of accomplishment by learning something I didn’t know before. I hope you guys like it to.
End personal horn-tooting.
Just so this post isn’t entirely devoid of art, I posted the pencils for the first page of the Zabka comic. There isn’t any speech or story text just yet, so you can speculate what’s happening in the panels. Sufice it to say, it appears geeks are laying a smackdown, and there is only one man who can set things right.