Arcade Artwork
Scans of Ms. Pac-man Sideart
I love little surprises like this.
I had a visitor (Kevin T.) stumble on my post about the Ms. Pac-man stencils that Joymonkey was working on last fall. I haven’t heard anything from Joymonkey, but some BYOAC members have reported that they got their stencils and are just waiting for nicer weather to use them. Kevin was looking for a set because his Ms. Pac-man artwork has the typical fade where there is no longer any pink, only yellow.
I know that many members over the years have probably scanned in the Ms. Pac-man cabinet artwork, and I know Joymonkey scanned it in from scratch when he remade the vector file for the stencils. But as far as I know, there aren’t any websites out there that have the scanned Ms. Pac-man available to download at this time. If you know of any other websites with a good Ms. Pac-man artwork scan, leave a comment and let’s start a list here. Joymonkey said he’d release his Ms. Pac-man vector file, maybe his sideart scan, once his stencils are done. But I don’t know if and when that might be.
Kevin spent a lot of time working on these scans, I mean a ton of time scanning in the Ms. Pac-man cabinet. But anyone who has attempted scanning arcade artwork before, knows how time consuming scanning can be. And not only do I have the composite files of the artwork, I have the individual pieces, all in two zip files. If you get a chance, leave a comment here and thank him for his time. I’ll make sure he gets the thank you. It sounds like he may attempt to also scan the Ms. Pac-man kickplate artwork, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.
The other note I should mention, Kevin expressed to me that these are a touch inaccurate in that some of the lines don’t align correctly. But, at first glance the artwork composite looks good, and if you don’t like the composite, you can remake your own full Ms. Pac-man sideart with the scan pieces. He shared a link on where with me on where the files are hosted, so just click on the images below for start downloading the zip files.
I am posting this brand new today, and don’t know how long it will be online, so get the files while you can. I am sure I may get some sort of nasty email from a nasty company who make a shoddy poor product with someone who would gladly take your money for an incorrect product (read dishonesty) for a President. But for a short while, you’ll have the artwork files available to you at least to do with them as you please.
Has anyone else used MediaFire to host files? It says there isn’t a time limit for hosting, but if the files aren’t downloaded frequently enough, will they remove them? I was able to successfully download the files, is anyone having any problems downloading the zips?
~Edit – In case you have issues downloading the scans of the Ms. Pac-man artwork from the links above at Mediafire, you can try to download them from this website mirror.
New Mad Planet CPO Reproductions
I would try to stay away from reposting information that was in the common arcade collecting groups, but I came across this post from Quarter Arcade about Mad Planet control panel overlay reproductions this morning just as it came across the wire. (more…)
Another Rare Mr. Do! Bezel on ebay
The second in a little over six months, here is another one of the rare artwork Mr. Do! bezels on ebay. This bezel appears to be in better condition than the Mr. Do! bezel I got back in late July of 2007 for $13 ($12 of which was shipping).
I could care less about an NOS Mr. Do! variant marquee, the marquee that actually goes with the white sideart Mr. Do!. I would like to have this version, but I would take one that is used, I would actually prefer it that way. Then there is no decision about keeping the marquee as a New Old Stock piece of artwork or not.
Hard to justify buying the two pieces of Mr. Do! artwork. With a starting bid of $19.99 and $20 shipping, a best case scenario o f $40 to have a duplicate, but better condition bezel with the marquee….it would be nice to have, but I would have to find a buyer for my other bezel first to rationalize that in my mind. Either way, I’ll be watching it:)
Pengo Numerals CPO Vectorized!
I got an email about a week ago (January 8th) from Chris. I knew that he had been working on the other Pengo CPO and it was a nice surprise to see that he had finished the final vector details.
Chris had a scan of the Pengo numerals control panel overlay, and he had completely vectorized the artwork in Paint Shop Pro awhile back. I had tried to convert that artwork, to bring it into Illustrator (A couple small things needed to be done, like the lettering and dot gradient and I don’t know PSP), but after a ton of hours searching I had no luck.
Well, in the meantime, Chris went out and taught himself Illustrator and did a bang up job tracing the Pengo CPO in one of his first vectorizing jobs. but he’s a small cookie anyway, he is a MIT grad! Here is a small image of it.
I am going to email him with some of my thoughts and opinions about some of the accuracy of the details. It might come down to a matter of preference between one artist and another, who knows, but we have had some good theological conversations about arcade reproduction artwork and everything will probably work out alright. Each arcade vector artist will trace something a little differently.
Having most of the Pengo artwork is a great start. We have a vector Illustrator file of Sega’s Pengo numerals CPO finished, sans color matching. As always, continue to follow Rotheblog for Pengo reproduction updates.
Artwork Bleed for Screen Printing Reproduction Arcade Artwork
If you have been following my blog, I have slowly been working on vectorizing every piece of the original Pengo artwork to have reproductions made for sale. I have another contact that is doing some vectorizing of a couple pieces of artwork, and he asked me if the Illustrator artwork pieces had to have any bleed on them for registration coverage when taking the pieces to the Screen Printing stage. I knew from working with Brian at Oleszak, that there needed to be some offset bleed on the shapes when making stencils, but I figured this was more for the home arcade game collector, who generally wouldn’t know much about registration for different colors of artwork. A “CYOA” kind of nicety.
So, I emailed Rich at This Old Game. I asked how much of a bleed he would add to individual shapes. 1/8″ bleed seemed too much to me for finer details, but for the larger details, only adding 1/16″ – 1/32″ didn’t seem hardly enough to make a difference. This is what he said;
Basically, to allow the color laps about center of the Black detail that it would cover. Also white is usually full coverage on the back of 2nd surface prints. On fine detail, I go in and just split the difference in specific spots where the thickness of the black may vary. But to answer your question, I do tend to add approx 1/8″ bleed unless that bleed doesn’t fit the artwork then I have to manually go in and split that difference. Any text I usually outline 5 to 10 pts.
I got a file from him, demonstrating some of this, but I don’t completely understand all of the concepts for screen printing reproductions yet. If you don’t have any idea what I am talking about, here is a photo of my Pengo marquee. You can see the bleed for the “TM” text showing through, as well as some of the halftone patterns and other pieces of artwork that overlap to make sure there is enough coverage.
The main idea I got from the information he sent was, yes, add bleed to the artwork to help with registration of colors, and it is a judgement call based on the detail of the artwork. The finer details of the reproduction arcade artwork add 1/16″ to 1/32″ of an inch bleed, and on some of the bigger, thicker details add 1/8″. (Not to mention, even though I didn’t ask this, I am sure that I need to start separating my artwork in colored layers) I know that both Brian and Darin read what I write here when they have time, and I figured they could lend their expertise in the information, or even Rich if he stops by. My main question remaining is what Rich said above;
Also white is usually full coverage on the back of 2nd surface prints.
Rich is the absolute best in terms of response time, although his emails are sometimes hard to understand because of the way they are worded. Here is a tight crop of the final prepped file he used reproduce the Professor Pac-man overlays from my vector artwork.
This looks exactly like the “TM” above, except, if the text is yellow, why have the color “white”. Wouldn’t that bled color be yellow there, showing really fat lettering?
So, there is a lot of work to do, added work to the final vectorizing Pengo files that I thought I had finished. But, they need to be right. I haven’t added bleed to any of them, so I will have to go back through and do that. Here are some close up details of my start to adding bleed to the Pengo artwork. There is a before vector trace (Purple Outline), and an after vector trace with the additional bleed (Light Blue Outline). (And after I got into the file and tried it for myself, I found that even 1/32″ bleed would overlay some of the surrounding pieces of artwork, and that I had to go down as small as 1/64″ (.016 of an inch rounded) bleed to prevent overlap.)
Local Arcade Pac-man Sideart Illustrator File Inaccurate
Brian Jones at Oleszak Creative picked up on my post the other day on the small inaccuracies in the Pengo Marquee vector artwork available on Local Arcade. As most classic arcade collectors already know, the Ms. Pac-man and Pac-man sideart Illustrator files available for download are also inaccurate, but until today I hadn’t dug any deeper to identify the inaccuracies of the artwork.
Brian sent me a Photoshop file showing just one small piece of the Pac-man sideart that is so wrong, I feel embarassed for tbombaci who originally traced it. A baby jacked up on meth could have done a better job.
The Pac-man artwork area in question is circled here (click on the image for a larger view);
The circled piece of detailed artwork is right below the curving “N” in Pac-man, where there are some black shapes that have the appearance of brush strokes. (You can download the Pac-man sideart Illustrator file here) The Local Arcade Pac-man file looks like this;
At first glance, any artist with a sense of detail should run screaming. If you are considering whether or not to take the Pac-man Side Art file from Local Arcade and print it, or makes stencils from it for your own project, this post is for you. Unless you want to throw the potential resale value of your machine into the toliet, listen up. Here is a detailed scan of that same area on the Pac-man sideart and I have also provided a photo of the same section from my own machine (just in case your a “Doubting Thomas” on the accuracy;
Wow! Seriously. I have frequented the BYOAC and Mame forums, and tbombaci (Tom) is actually very good at tracing classic arcade sideart, so, I don’t know what happened with this particular file. It was uploaded in 2004, so maybe this was one of Tom’s first forays into tracing sideart, maybe he didn’t have an accurate scan to work from, or maybe he just provided an auto trace version quickie for the Mame guys who didn’t really care how true this artwork was to the original Midway Pac-man. But if this single portion was so lazily reproduced, you can just imagine how wrong the rest of the Pac-man artwork is.
I don’t know the original circumstances, hopefully Tom will find this and fill us in. (I just wish that Local Arcade had more of a community, with collectors rating and commenting on the artwork. The usability of that site, including the search, is horrendous. Thank you to Mahuti for starting it, but we as a collecting community need to get more involved to make it a better resource. But that is another topic entirely.)
Here is a good vector trace of the same artwork, and you can see the richer detail that is more true to the original Pac-man artwork;
Like I mentioned in the Pengo marquee post, there is some line irregularity that makes any arcade artwork more interesting.
The point of my post is not a new one, do your research before using any of the artwork on Local Arcade. But in the case of the more popular arcade artwork files, there are no short cuts. You are better to start from scratch and know it is accurate than to take any shortcuts.
Standing Sega Pengo Marquee
Since 2005, there has been a vector file version of the standing Sega Pengo marquee on Arcade Art Library (localarcade.com). The author is “rockworm”, and I don’t recognize that name on any other forum. Right away, I question the accuracy of the file. “Rockworm” hasn’t added another file over the last two years, so it is hard to know if he just printed out a copy on an inkjet and therefore the Pengo artwork didn’t have to be exact, or what the final use was. So before I assumed I could use the artwork in my Pengo reproductions, I decided that I should do some close up comparisons of the Pengo artwork to the original marquee scan. Here is what I found;
You can see some differences in the line shapes in the Pengo marquee vector drawing detail (first image) vs. the Pengo marquee scan. Some lines have been smoothed out and some angles aren’t the same. And let’s not forget, the most important idea is the attention to detail. If you look closely, there is a piece missing completely. What else is wrong with this vector Pengo marquee file? It is hard to trust the integrity when there are pieces of the Pengo artwork missing. The accuracy is close, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t perfect.
So, at the very least, I have already redrawn the standing Pengo character on this marquee. I will check the lettering for accuracy, maybe I can reuse that artwork. I will post progress hopefully in the next day or two since the Pengo bezel is complete.
Back to the shapes of the original lines. When I think about restoring this old artwork, I try to think about the original process the art director at Sega would have gone through. To make this artwork into a screen to print onto different materials he would have had to have drawn it, and then transferred it to film. In my mind, the original Pengo artwork shouldn’t have the most crisp lines, there would be some variances in line thickness because it was a hand drawn line, not computer generated. So, when looking at a small zoomed in portion of the original Arcade Art Library artwork;
I see the vector lines resolved and reduced. The accuracy of the original Pengo shapes is off, and even though the details will be so small when printed only a true expert would know the difference, I like to detail it out here because these Pengo reproductions are for everyone, not just me. Not to mention, some portions look like they could have been run through an auto trace function because of how sharp some of the edges are.
Here is that same portion that I redrew. Note that the detail here is the side of the ice block Pengo is resting on, and in my drawing the side is a darker blue just like the original artwork. The file on AAL doesn’t have this.
When looking at the original artwork, I don’t trace every jagged edge, I make a judgement call. If the Pengo artwork seems like it should have a smooth line, then I add it in, but sometimes, the bumpiness of the line is what makes the artwork more authentic in my mind.
Agree? Know a little bit more about the original game manufacturer’s art making process? Know who “rockworm” is? Leave a comment and give us your insights.
