The Pickford Bros Blog
Posts from John and Ste
Acorn - A World In Pixels cover art
Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Fri, 08 Jan 2021
In early 2020 I was asked to design a cover for a new book, Acorn - A World In Pixels, by the publisher IDesine. The book would be a kind of encyclopaedia and celebration of all the games released on Acorn's BBC Micro and Electron home computers.
I kne...
Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint goes ...
Blog posted by JPickford
Wed, 04 Sep 2013
As of today, our iOS game Magnetic Billiards is now free for the main game (20+ levels). We've also dropped the price of in-app purchases to the lowest tier (69p / $1) for level packs and the Skeleton Key which gives you all the content plus access to pr...
Is fairness the first casualty of b...
Blog posted by JPickford
Tue, 01 May 2012
Over the last few weeks I've heard of a business practice amongst indie developers that I found quite shockingly unfair. This lead me to thinking about the concept of fairness in business. I suppose, along with my brother Ste, I've been a businessman ...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
In this version I’ve added the shading, which makes a big difference. On every side of every block I added a darken or lighten gradient, fading away from the most forward corner of that block. I also faded down the saturation of each block towards its b...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
Here I dumped the background buildings, and those on the horizon (thank goodness for drawing everything on separate layers), and added the flat colours for all the shapes. The two borders represent where the art could be cropped. The inner border was th...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
I added the same lens distortion effect in Affinity Paint to my clouds pencils, pinching them a bit in the middle and making them feel bigger and further away, then inked them. This was all pretty quick. I also inked in the extra buildings, but in the e...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
Neater pencils of the clouds and the floor. The clouds were looking good, but I still wasn’t happy with the buildings. Maybe they will work once I add the lens distortion effect?
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
The next day I started browsing twitter with my morning coffee, and saw a comic panel posted by the brilliant John Cullen (@nellucnhoj), where he’d drawn some beautiful clouds in the background, where they were flat on the bottom, and bubbly above, sort ...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
OK, I’d finally finished the inking. My hand was aching, but I was nearly finished, right? Just quickly bang in some clouds for the background then I could colour it in and I’d be done. I imagined some swirly clouds in the background, not too obtru...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
I took my distorted pencils from Affinity Paint and imported them back into Clip Studio to start the inking. This stage was fairly straightforward, although quite time consuming. Because I’d done the lens distortion, and all the previously straight li...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
This is where it got good! Although the pencilling was going to plan, I thought it was looking a bit pedestrian. It wasn’t giving me that sense of awe and wonder I got from 80s game covers or 70s sci fi novel covers. The pyramid didn’t feel ‘bigâ€...
Blog posted by Ste Pickford
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
Now I added some ‘puzzles’ to the faces of some of the blocks. I was aiming for a sort of Mayan ziggurat kind of thing - mysterious stone blocks recessed into the stone walls, suggesting indecipherable messages from the ancients. I wanted it to echo t...
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