Arcade Resources
Measurements and more robots on Agent X kickplate
Felt refreshed enough now that I took a little bit of a break from working on this artwork that I got back at it today. I redrew the arms, or about 60% of them, from the closer more details photos I had gotten later on. I spliced that artwork into the robot I had, making a copy of the finished one before I started working and then I had a copy of the after as well.
I moved the robot over, duplicated it, rotated and sized it until I had three that fit really well like the originals on the kickplate.
Then I started to attack the borders. I drew the outer black border, and the beveled green towards the outside. I started to adjust them so I had straighter lines, things were equal, etc. etc. I evened up the top of the kickplate and called it good for now.
I had to get measurements from Richard on this piece probably next. But in terms of the art, I can make the artwork butt up nicer to the borders and I can check my spacing a little bit. I also have to make masks for the robots, because the way I drew it with negative space more than individual objects I can’t just push the robots back in the stacking order.
May 24th, 2007
Got the game into the basement tonight, for it’s final resting place for awhile. The monitor was great in the garage until I moved it around, and then when we moved it into the basement it got better again. Was a ton of work though, figured out that we can’t have a game facing out with it’s back against the window. The back really has to be against the guest room closet wall. But it works.
Mr. Do! Ice Cream finished, for now
Punched out the remaining shapes I had drawn for the ice cream drawing. I was doing an on / off comparison of the artwork vs. the original image. It is a decent image to work from, but a scan would be even better. For now I think I am going to say that I am done.
There are some areas that are hard to see if the orange is showing through or not. The way it was put on the cab is a little weird. The yellow paint doesn’t appear to be thick enough to cover the orange, so a lot of the orange shows through. So that makes it kind of tough to tell what is what, and hard to replicate in vector form. When I check my work, it doesn’t seem like it has nearly enough orange, but again, hard to tell. Plus, for now, I had to leave the base of the glass stand a solid yellow because I don’t know what the bottom looks like outside of the photos above on the page and freehanding it. Anyone out there have comments?
Cutting wood for Mr. Do! control panel
Tonight I went over to a friend’s to use some of his tools, and have him help me cut up a board to use on the back side of the control panel. It was some composite wood from a shelf, that we cut down to size, drilled the holes for the joystick and the two buttons, and then did some holes for the bolts to hold the clips on. He had a cool drill bit with a counter sink, but the hole size was just a fraction too small. Plus, the holes we drilled with his wood blades were just a touch too small. So, now I need to see if I can possibly purchase some wood blades to make the holes bigger, and look again for small but longer carriage bolts. But things are very close.
Working on Agent X kickplate border pattern
Spent a little time tonight in starting on the complex border for the kickplate artwork. I drew the little rounded rectangle with the
end notches, and repeated it for the outside border of the artwork. Next, I do the same for around the inside of the artwork by the coin door, and then go back and make sure the black and green borders are straight.
May 16th, 2007
Got out tonight and worked on the control panel. The control panel I am using is a rusted, beat up Pac-man with most of the chewed up overlay still on it. I had gradiose ideas of taking that off in one piece and keeping it, but sad to say, in the end it was anything but in one piece. I did some scraping to take away the outside plastic layer with a 5 in 1, and then started trying different chemicals to get it off.
I had read Acetone worked really good for getting Midway overlay’s off, but all that did was take off the painted artwork for the overlay, it did nothing for the 3M adhesive. I tried Goof Off, and that worked fairly good, but the best was the same remaining paint stripper I used on the cabinet (Stripeeze). That got me right down to the painted panel.
I got it sanded down fairly well. I thought briefly about leaving it as just the metal color, but I would have had to work that much harder on the details to get out all the small areas of paint left. I didn’t need to in painting it over, so I wiping it down, and gave it two coats of spray paint before the night was over. Looking pretty cool, amazing how nice it looks after you do that. I was pretty surprised when I sanded down the exposed panel on the Pac-man I have.
Next is setting up the wood for the backside, which a friend was going to help me but he may be busy for awhile now, I am not sure.
Black fill on Agent X robots
Worked on the artwork just a little tonight. I finished the outline for the robot so I could make the main black fill. I traced it as
best as I could see, knowing that at the very least I would have to go back and redo the detail on the arms. But Richard had emailed to see where I was at, so I thought it would be nice to show him this piece at least, since it has so much detail.
