Well, where to start? Many things have happened since I blogged last. Well, I’ll start with what’s newest!

I have finally got the Titanium Knights character profiles up. The profiles are not totally finished yet, however. I still need to draw a profile pic for each character. One of the things holding up the pics is my uniform design process. I want the uniforms to be just so, but that is slowing me down. At least the ideas are simple, and once actually designed, should be simple to draw repeatedly. The profiles so far can be found here. Don’t be fooled – there are more characters in the story than what is currently shown, but I don’t want to reveal them all just yet. You’ll have to wait until the story unfolds.

Speaking of character profiles, I have also published character profiles for… The AntiBalls Force. I’m not making a big production out of the AntiBalls Force yet, because of, well, the the lack of time I have to work on them. I will not give up on them, however, as they have brought me to tears via laughter on many an occasion. I have at least three comic pages in mind for their introduction story. You can observe their profiles here. Yes, in the toilet section!

On a side note, I have decided to change up the production process for the Titanium Knights Episode 3 comic. Originally, I had planned to use digital scenery software to generate the backgrounds, as seen on page two here. After using it, and seeing the results, I was not totally pleased, but wasn’t exactly sure why. The backgrounds were beautiful! Then it hit me -

It wasn’t really my original creation.

In the past, I’ve always drawn my own backgrounds for comics, and always got a sense of satisfaction from doing so. So why did I decide to change to something else?

I believe that it was the pressure of being timely. I’m a little self conscious about being slow when working on my personal projects, so, as a shortcut, I tried scene creation software. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking anyone who uses such software. I am simply deciding not to use it for my comics because it doesn’t fit in with my artistic vision. My motivation for using scene creation software was misguided – timeliness vs. artistic vision.

So, I am officially removing pressure from myself by eliminating my artificial deadlines. In doing so, I empower myself to work on my projects in the proper manner – to simply express my creativity just for the sake of the enjoyment of doing so. (I hope that makes sense! lol) Everything will be either hand drawn or created in an art software program. So, anyone who wants to know when Titanium Knights Episode 3 will be done, I’ll tell you.

When it’s done.

Another thing I will do to lessen any pressure on myself is… not focus on the profitability of my site. Now, I definitely want to earn money doing something I enjoy, but if I mysteriously received a message from the future informing me that my site would never make any money, would I quit and shut down my site?

Absolutely not.

I will make sure my focus is only on my artistic vision – not timeliness, nor profit.

Idealistic? Darn straight.

Realistic? Maybe not. Well then, I will just take control of my own reality.

Thanks for reading.

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Hello all! It’s been quite a while since I last blogged. I have been quite busy in the interim, but not with what I really wanted to work on. I find myself working more on my site’s infrastructure than on it’s content. Not the best of ideas, considering that content is king. However…

You probably didn’t notice, but I have totally rebuilt TitaniumKnights.net from the ground up, including this here blog. Well, if you were paying attention, you would have noticed the blog changes – I coded the blog template to look identical to that of the main site. Furthermore, you would only have noticed any changes to the main site if you looked at the source code. I wanted to make the code cleaner, faster, and source ordered while keeping the site visually the same.

The site rebuild took about a month or so since my XHTML and CSS knowledge was very limited. But it was a great learning experience. I can now build websites from scratch using just a text editor and a graphics program. (And the occasional code reference off the net…)

The source ordering, to my surprise, really made a huge difference. Before the site rebuild, I received very little traffic via search engines – about 4%. Now, according to Google Analytics, it’s about 20%. With the same content. Cool. I only wish that I had done it sooner…

So, now I have an average of about 200 visits per month. Of course, I intend to have much more than that! So, I’m learning about web marketing. I have pretty much no backlinks yet, but that’s okay. I have a proven track record of learning new things and achieving measured results using my newly learned skills. I also need to get back to my content creation goals. But I have so many of them… maybe that’s the problem…

Er…

Anyway, I also set up an online community forum on my other site at SteveWexlerIT.com/Forums. It is a place for discussing technology, audio/video, creative ventures, entertainment, and console/pc gaming. And since I’m plugging other sites here, check out CookiesNCupcakes.com. It’s run by my wife, and she is an excellent baker! I’ve put on quite a few pounds eating her desserts, why not join me?

Take care all!

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