I recently became the proud owner of an original 1980 Bally Midway Pacman cabinet. The cab is in fairly good condition for its age, but as with so many pacs, people have rest their hands on the side when playing. This has worn the paint and artwork away. The machine also has knocks and scuffs from its life in an arcade. Given that i love restoring these machines as much as playing them, i have (probably foolishly) decided to start a fresh. My first thought is to look at getting some stencils made, repainting the cabinet, and then applying the stenciled artwork to the cab, just like it was when it was made.
Where to start
To make some stencils, you first need artwork. Once you have artwork, it has to be prepared. This involves creating colour seperation layers which are vital when creating stencils or silkscreen templates. Each layer will be painted on, followed by the next. In the case of Pacman, we will need a blue, red and black layer. So where to get the artwork? After a 20 minute google, i find some vectorized art, which appears pretty good at a first glance, however when i start comparing it to my machine, i notice some differences:-
The downloaded art is on the left, and a pic of my pacman art on the right. Notice that the dotted lines are more spaced and curved and the "swoosh" has more detail. The ghosts eye brow is also different.
Ok, so the free vector art is a great resource to find online, but not suitable for my project. With this in mind, i decide that i will recreate the artwork myself.
The Plan
To faithfully recreate the art, the machine graphics need to be somehow imported into a computer and painstakingly traced on a vector package such as Adoble Illustrator. I have a photographer friend who has just purchased a Nikon D700 SLR Digital Camera, so after a quick phone call he agrees to come around and take some snaps.
We setup a tripod and make a plan to split the side art into four images, that we will combine into one large, super hi-res image in photoshop. We are lacking decent tools to measure distance when positioning the tripod for each shot, so we make a plumb-line from some cotton with a key on the end and suspend it from the tripod!
After a few test shots, we start to take pictures. Each time we change the tripod position, we measure the distance between the camera and the machine, and set the horizontal position via a handy feature on the camera called "Virtual Horizon" that acts as a spirt level. This sounds pretty easy writing this now, but we spent over 3 hours adjusting the camera and taking pictures alone!
Photoshopping the results
Once we had the four final shots, we imported the results into photoshop and started to position each picture. Starting from the bottom of the machine and working our way up, each layer is put in place.
After 30-40 minutes, we are both happy that this part of the task has been completed and step back to admire the 31 megapixel image that we have created! You can see a reduced size version to the left. It doesn't look to be anything more than picture of the side of a Pacman, but can be zoomed into to see every little detail and mark on the machine, which is vital to making accurate vectors. Now the hard part begins...Hopefully sometime very soon...
The legal bit:
It is illegal to reproduce and distribute copyrighted artwork, therefore i must stress that this is a personal project and is posted on this blog soley for educational purposes. I hope you enjoy reading my progress, but i am afraid to say that it will not be possible to distribute the results. You can get officially licensed reproduction vinyl pacman artwork at twobits. Thanks for reading!
Tags:
artwork,
pacman,
sideart
Categories:
Artwork |
Cabinets