Arcade Artwork
Finish and repeating Professor Pac-man character
Finished up the first Pac-man tonight, and was able to rotate it around with the different hands so in theory, I have all three of the Pac-mans on the control panel overlay done now. I know I will spot more pieces later to adjust, but for now the Pac-men are good. I also did some font matching on Whatthefont.com for the instructions text on the control panel. I have a feeling I will have to trace all that by hand, so that will be time consuming. Tomorrow I will start finalizing the pink borders and make a firm decision on what to do about the text.
Pretty easy piece to cruise through, exciting to see the Professor Pac-man control panel overlay artwork come together.
Tracing Professor Pac-man character
Got through more of the first Pac-man character today. The other nice part of the artwork on the control panel for Professor Pac-man is that the little Pac-men are pretty much the same. A little rotating, a different hand, and that is all the variation, so once I finish one, I can just repeat it and make the modifications and be done. I also finished the poofy lettering on the left and the right, which was more repeating and adjustments.
Chat with Richard Ford – Jr. Pac-man color matching
Finally got to chat today with Richard on the phone. Nice guy, has been doing this for quite some time so he has met a lot of people and has a lot of good information and fun stories. The coolest thing was that when he was poking around in his basement he found a piece of the original Jr. Pac-man from the kickplate that he is going to mail to me. This way I can color match pretty much every color but two on the sideart with some Pantone cards. This is what I consider the last piece before I would be able to get the art made for myself and him.
I thought maybe for a limited run maybe it would make sense to make a couple more, but only if there was a guarantee on return, and that pretty much never happens so that probably won’t happen. After talking to him though, even though I know I called about 6 printers here in town, I think I need to investigate a little more and do some more price checking just to make sure I have the best price that goes with the best quality of print. Silkscreening was how it was originally done, so I will just have to find the best medium for replicating as possible.
Assessing the Professor Pac-man control panel artwork
I took a look at the artwork, and not only was it doable without too much trouble in Illustrator, I knew it would be a pretty simple piece overall. Just some simple pink borders, with three small Pac characters, and some fat lettering. The largest worry I knew would be the instructions text that is on the control panel itself.
Got photos of the artwork today from Richard. He sent me close ups of the cpanel in three segments, and one overall image. I straightened all of the images using rulers in Photoshop, and prepped the image to be traced in Illustrator. I got through a portion of the first Pac-man character, and the pink borders today before guests arrived.
Jr. Pac-man kickplate and sideart
Here it is! I am pretty pumped that they are both finished, and that they are in my possession.
I have obviously distorted the images, downsampled them quite a bit, and put a waterRichard of sorts. I don’t know how someone would retrace artwork from this file, I suppose it is possible and if they are able to go through the trouble of remaking it from this crappy file, I applaud them. You may not be sure about whether I made these or not, but that isn’t really important because I did. I just want to do my best to let people out there know I have this and they can contact me if they want a copy.
Tonight I finished up the kickplate artwork, pretty quick actually. Two days to redraw the whole thing was a ton of work, it felt like it was
just as complex as the sideart. I am sending them back to Richard with some further communication to start the process of color matching the
two pieces.
On a sidenote, I saw today that the Jr. Pac-man has been relisted on ebay in Marion at a discounted price from December. However, still out
of my price range, but getting closer.
Photos of Jr. Pac-man kickplate
Richard got right back to me today, told me that the Jr. Pac-man sideart looked really good, and had taken some photos of the kickplate for me to work on as well. He said he would also be more than willing to help me do any color matching I might need to do. That may be tough, but I am glad that he is willing, really nice guy. He is in PA, and not too far from Indy. I have started thinking about going out there to see his collection, maybe in late April.
Final vectorized image of Jr. Pac-man sideart
I emailed Richard with a small image of the final Jr. Pac-man sideart tonight and explained it a little bit. I asked him for some feedback, to look at it carefully and see what he thought. I also told him, that I thought I had a vector version of the kickplate art, or at least some larger images, but I didn’t and I asked if he could take some photos of that for me also.
