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!
Christmas Loot
I’m feeling both happy and sad that the holidays are winding down. Sad because I had a really good Christmas — complete with many geeky gifts from my wife — and happy because life can settle down again for a couple of months.
I spent Christmas week driving to various family gatherings, hosting our first holiday at our house and trying my best to relax during all the chaos that these times bring. My family did a good job of taking the hint that I like playing videogames, as I now have enough of them to keep me busy well into the Spring. I’m pretty sure Laura enjoyed her Christmas as well, and I know she’s excited to start our bathroom remodeling project. We’re very close to having enough money to get started.
One of the games I got for Christmas was the World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Expansion. Now, I’m what I like to call a hyper-casual WoW player. I try to get into it a couple of ours a week at least, but I’m in no way trying to ruin my real life by playing in a digital one. Getting the new expansion has me excited to reach the level cap I need to move into the new content, so I’ve been thinking about the game a little more than usual. The art with this post is a drawing of my Tauren Druid named Zurock. He’s a level 67 right now, so I only need three more levels before I can try out the new stuff.
I think this turned out pretty well. It was my second attempt at drawing my character — the first ended up with a terrible pose. I feel like this pose fits the personality of my character more. And now I’m going to stop before I start getting way nerdy if I haven’t already.
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.
KRC Website 2.0
Welcome to the new Killer Robot Comics website. If anyone follows my blog — and kudos if you do — you may have noticed that I haven’t updated in about two months. Many reasons have contributed to this, but the main reason is that I decided I wanted to get Killer Robot Comics 2.0 live. After thinking about different ideas, I decided on a Wordpress-powered blog where I could manage my website, portfolio and random sketch postings all in one place. I thought this might be the easiest way to keep all of my work together and make it better for people who actually follow what I write and draw.
The blog postings, sketches and comments system is all here still, with the added bonus of being able to post about my actual design projects, show off my portfolio and link to my resume. I guess you could say that it’s an actual website. Thanks to everyone who still reads and views my stuff, and I promise you now that my free time for design isn’t taken up with the site, you should see more frequent random art and actual project pieces popping up here. So, update your bookmarks and feeds and email me (srllaves[at]gmail[dot]com) or leave a comment if something is borked. Thanks so much.
I decided to kick off the new site with the sketch I used to create the poster for the Final HQAX Show last month. My original idea changed a little from an all-out royalty-free-dinosaur-drawing look to what you see now. I just think I couldn’t decide on a style that fit the information. The final poster design changed slightly from what I originally created for better readibility, but you can see the original version here.
In a room very, very nearby…
I’m very excited about the release of The Force Unleashed video game if for no other reason than I hear that the story is excellent. The demo of the game was enjoyable, and I can see myself playing this quite a bit when I get my hands on a copy. Because I’m excited to play the game, have been reading a couple of Star Wars extended universe novels, and gleaming Wookiepedia at work, I’ve been on a big Star Wars kick. So, because he is so bad-ass and completely absent from the kid-friendly Clone Wars movie, I give you a sketch of General Grievous.
I started storyboarding the Zabka comic this week, and I hope to get a lot more of it done over the weekend. I’ve never actually created a comic before, so getting the ideas and scenes from my brain to paper are quite a challenge. The storyboards are helpful, but even after that, I have to somehow divide dialogue amongst panels with action, characters and movement. I’m very excited to be working on something this ambitious. Maybe I’ll scan a couple of my better boards here when I’m done with that step.
Art should pick up now that the Summer is winding down and I’m planning on getting some new equipment — drawingboard, paints, etc — to do more things. Plus, I should be finishing Half Life 2 completely this weekend, which I’ve been addicted to for the last three weeks. Here’s to the fall, my favorite time of year.
That Dang Whistle
Two pieces in one post! It’s one way to make it look like you draw more than you really do.
The first one is Protoman from the Mega Man series. I was inspired by the I Am 8-Bit stuff, and decided to draw my favorite Mega Man character. I’d like to evolve this into a finished piece to get over my fear of backgrounds and have something that’s frame-worthy. I know he “died” in one of the other early Mega Man games, but if they sneaked him back into Mega Man 9, I wouldn’t complain.
I can’t really explain the second one, really, because it’s just a matter of “what you see, is what you get.” An idea for a penguin with a sword was mentioned in conversation at work, and I took it a few steps further. And yes, that is a martini glass in his hand.
I’m also trying out one of those personal logos that some artists place on their pieces. It seems to be popular with comic cover artists and whatnot. I just got tired of typing my name on everything and wanted a unique way to copyright my stuff. Whether this one sticks or not, I can’t say, but I like it now.
Now if I could just get some time to do some meat and bones art for the projects I’m supposed to be working on rather than just doodling around in my limited free time, I’d be a happy man.
EVA: Attempt 01
I’ve been meaning to draw an EVA ever since I started watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. I’ve started and stopped at least a half-dozen times because I just couldn’t get the proportions or the pose that I wanted. So I copped out a little and found a picture of the Revoltech toy online and used it for reference. Even though it turned from a true original art piece to more of a figure study, I still like it. My next goal will be to do my own version of an EVA.
I also finished the poster that I mentioned last blog, but I want to wait until I can go back to finalize the illustration before I post the color one. I didn’t get the kind of time I wanted to truly finish it the way I envisioned (i.e. I didn’t get to shade it).
Return to Order
After spending a good eight hours putting all my toys on shelves in the new office — 1 hour to install shelves, 7 hours for toy placement — I finally feel settled in my new work area. So, I celebrated by getting back to work on the Zabka comic. Here are a few head study sketches for The Zabka himself.
I think the writers and I are getting together soon to go over the story again and get started on the page layouts. In the meantime, I’m going to start doing some Macchio sketches and even do some new studies of the main characters. I feel like my style has already evolved and improved in the past couple of months, and I want to try something slightly different with the main characters.
I also got to start playing around with my Intuos 3 last weekend, and while I feel like I’m learning to draw all over again, I think I started getting a handle of it by the time I wrapped up for the day. I think I figured out the settings I want too. Using the tablet is going to save so much time it’s not even funny.
I’ll try to post some pics of the office just because the amount of toys in that room is borderline insane. All that’s left is to paint the walls in there, but I can wait a few months for that.
Hail Him! Again!
Laura and I moved into the new place three weeks ago and we’re just now getting settled. Of course, one of the first things we did was make the trip to IKEA and buy a crapload of stuff that is absolutely necessary. Two of those things we tables that I’m using as my new desk and they completely rock. I finally have the ability to not only place my scanner and new printer — used from Jeff — near my iMac for once, but I also have room to spread out a little more. All that’s left is to build some shelving so that I can surround myself in toys while I work, and I’ll be all set.
I also received my new Wacom tablet in the mail last week, but because of the many minor projects and trips I’ve had to make for the new house, I haven’t even had time to open the box, let alone mess around with the tablet itself. I’m still working on my ideas for a Starscream mural for my room as well as compiling as large a selection of sketches that I can use to practice with the tablet. I posted a quick 20 minute sketch of another idea with this blog. He’s supposed to be flying, but I ran out of room on the paper for the air thrusts on his feet.
I listened to the podcast by Scott Kurtz of PvP today and learned a lot more than what I thought I knew about the proposed Orphan Works bills that are being talked about in the House and the Senate. I sent one of the form letters from this site to my Congressman, Senator and Governor and though I got a pretty standard response, I think by contributing this way, hopefully as a group, we can get this stopped. If you haven’t already, please use one of these form letters to let your political leaders know that you oppose the Orphan Works bills. You don’t want the creators of art to be stripped of their copyrights nor have their creations used without their permission. And if you do want that, I hope you find yourself staring into the many eyes of a Deep Crow.
All Hail…Starscream
I’m throwing around ideas for a mural I want to do in my new office. I’m thinking of a Starscream portrait or art piece, and I really want a version of “King Starscream”. Too bad he only got to be king for about three minutes of the animated movie before he was obliterated by Galvatron.
It’s hard to do sketches at work though — mostly because I rush them — and I end up with some wonky proportions and whatnot. (His legs look a little small and if I could redo that left hand about fifty times, I still don’t think I would get it the way I want.) It’s a good start though, and definitely something to throw into the practice pile for when I get my tablet.
It’s kind of scary to share these raw sketches, since I’m not used to showing anyone anything until I’m completely finished with a piece.