Elderflower champagne...

Its summer and brewing time.

Finally found time to up the brewing game and label some bottles properly.

Stamped wax seals hand inked labels. All unique. All tasty.

Apples, Games, Pixels & Nudity + Illustration, Animation & more Games too

Another speed paint

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long time no see

I haven't posted here in quite a while... lots of exciting things going on at the moment.

Cavendish is really really close to complete - time to start work on the promo site. I'll be posting updates and screen shots soon. Not looking forward to recording video tutorial unless I can find someone else to do the voice over...

PixelBeard games is going really well - had some unexpected press coverage!

Anyway here's an hour speed paint.

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Pixel Beard Games

I started making videogames again!

I decided that it would make sense to keep my videogame 'PixelBeard' posts separate... So if you'd like to peek inside the game making process come check out the PixelBeard blog.

I'd really appreciate followers/comments/feedback it all helps keep me motivated! Plus I'd like to invite everyone to take part in a pole and help decided a future game's genre.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to post some work too... PixelBeard logo progress & ideas.



Initially I wanted to make a pixel with a beard logo and render it in a demoscene-esque manner. Harking back to retro logos like Psygnosis's (old school brilliance). I'm sure it would have been a mistake though - I opted to keep it simple and went with a standard base size of 16x16 pixels for the core logo - most of the time you'll see it scaled up but it works small too.

I'll definitely do the more impressive rendering style for a later game load screen or something but a logo needs to be simplistic. Preferably survive being reproduced in black and white. Plus I wanted it to be suitably low res. I do love my pixels...

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The geekiest thing i've ever done

100 1000 1111 10000 10111 101010

Yeah I'm a geek.

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Cavendish Logo/Icon

Worked on this last night. Took a while to get it to look right but I'm pretty happy with it now - we'll see how I feel tomorrow...

All Photoshop - did look at vectoring it to go with the current icon trends but the details on the cutlery would have been lost...

Anyway its for Cavendish CMS (see my last post). If you're wondering why there is a silver fork, knife and spoon on a napkin read on, do read on.

I've based Cavendish's branding around the idea of an old English butler. Cavendish is an online assistant. He (is it ok to refer to inanimate objects you've created by name and gender? Usually I'd say yes, I name my pixel characters and drawings, but with a program it seems odd. For some reason 'Cavendish' is ok but 'he' seems to far. Cavendish is both more inamimate and animate than a picture. It/He does things yet has no face to put the name too...) helps web novices, or anyone really, to maintain their website. Hopefully meaning they can't accidentally remove content or destroy the look of their site.

Anyway I've always liked the idea that an experienced butler, perhaps Jeeves, Alfred or Humphries , might know more about being gentry than his employers. He knows the etiquette for everything. When to wear what, what to serve when. So that's the basic idea behind Cavendish (Except he's not a prick).

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Cavendish b3.0

Here's a little glimpse of the latest version of Cavendish my Flash based CMS (Content Management System).

Its basically an online application that allows users to edit their website's content. I'll post later this week detailing Cavendish's feature set (It's surprising versatile with b2.0 running an online store already).

I'm currently building beta version 3.0 - quite a few improvements being made, mostly behind the scenes, but noticeably the GUI is being streamlined.

I'm also finally getting round to implementing an automated publishing function that generates a simple HTML only site. This will allow universal access to the core content. So mobile devices and public computers (with no flash player installed) will be able to view the site and it'll make the sites fully search engine indexable.


[This is the b3.0 HTML editor]

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