Jr. Pac-man
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.
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.
Reworking parts of vector Jr. Pac-man sideart
Retraced Jr. Pac-man’s kite tonight in the hour or so worth of time that I had. I also adjusted the original sideart artwork that I had done for the Jr. Pac so tomorrow I can size in the more correctly drawn kite, and hopefully start to get some feedback on the colors and overall look of the traced piece from Richard.
More work on vectorizing Jr. Pac-man sideart
I got to work on my sideart some more tonight. I retraced some of the different shapes on the shoe region. I added in some hatching detail on the inside of the laces, tones up some shapes that I missed or miss viewed and didn’t draw correctly. I also fixed the bottom of the shoes, the circle sections. The photos Richard took are awesome and clear. I also started to retrace the kite before I had to get to bed.
Jr. Pac-man Kickplate
Realized today, as I was talking about my Jr. Pac-man artwork journey for this webpage, that in fact I don’t have Illustrator vector art for the kickplate, it was the bezel I was thinking of that I got off of localarcade. I hope Richard can also take some photos of that for me.
