Artwork Reproduction
Make a classic arcade logo in 5 minutes
There was a topic thread started today on BYOAC where a member was trying to make a simple logo with a double thick outline. This is A-typical of arcade logos on flyers and designs from the 1980’s. Fortunately, making a similar retro arcade logo today is easy, it’s quick and only takes 5 minutes. So here we go, a short little how-to tutorial on designing your own old arcade logo. (more…)
Arcade Artwork: Getting committed buying collectors for your reproduction project
For all of the great arcade websites that exist for collectors to interact and collaborate, I have not come across many articles that I would consider a “primer” series stepping a potential future collector through the process of having arcade artwork reproduced. There are a lot of small nuances and skills that go into a run of reproduction artwork and we are going to try to cover all of the main points in this series. (more…)
Arcade Artwork: Researching past arcade reproductions
For all of the great arcade websites that exist for collectors to interact and collaborate, I have not come across many articles that I would consider a “primer” series stepping a potential future collector through the process of having arcade artwork reproduced. There are a lot of small nuances and skills that go into a run of reproduction artwork and we are going to try to cover all of the main points in this series. (more…)
Screen printing / color seperations diagram of Defender marquee
After my post yesterday on “Artwork Bleed for Screen Printing Reproduction Arcade Artwork” I got some awesome feedback from industry experts like Rich at This Old Game, and Brian at Oleszak Creative. As I still grasp at understand some of the ideas in screening arcade game marquees, I thought it might be best to draw up a little illustration to show how I am picturing how a typical marquee would be printed in an exploded view.
Putting accuracy of the artwork found on Local Arcade aside (view my breakdown of the Midway Pac-man sideart artwork inaccuracies), I went out and grabbed the Defender marquee for demonstration purposes.
Defender marquee vector file at Local Arcade – (http://www.localarcade.com/arcade_art/r29.search.htm).
Assuming the colors in this file are correct, and taking each color of Defender marquee artwork and separating them into layers, I would have six layers total, a black, a blue, a yellow, and orange and a red.
As you can see from the illustration above, this is my understanding and how I picture the screen printing order, with the black being printed first (to trap all of the other colors below it, and to hide the bleed) , the blue second, the orange third, the yellow fourth and the finally the red with a white sealing coat over the back. In the illustration, I have shown the Defender artwork in a fashion so you would be able to recognize it, but in reality, the films would be printed in reverse, and if you looked straight down at the marquee, you would also see the printing in reverse. In fact, the Defender marquee artwork might looks something like this;
Plus, this isn’t a really good illustration to show bleed amounts, but I wanted to check to make sure I had the bigger screen printing concepts correct. (I don’t know the detailed history of my games enough to know if the Williams Defender marquee was on glass, or plexi. Probably glass.)
Some good resources that are written simply and helped me get a better understanding on this topic.
- eHow : How to Design a Multiple-Color Stencil for Silk Screen Printing
- YouTube – Screen printing multiple color print video 1
- YouTube – Screen printing multiple color print video 2
Worth a note, I am not starting from scratch on my experience and knowledge base on this topic. I silk screened a couple of shirts way back in 8th grade. How much that counts, not a lot. But it does give me some familiarity with inks, and frames for the screens. But we never “burned” our films, and we never messed with more than one color or registration. These are the areas where I am shaky. A quick (10 minute) search didn’t bring up any visual tutorials on bleeds in screen printing. I didn’t think there would be resources specifically for arcade reproduction artwork screen printing, but thought there would be something else. I must not have searched with the right terms.
So, I need feedback. Is my thinking wrong? Is there a white sealing layer, and what is that actually called? Do you have any good links, or even better yet, and great visual image based tutorials on screen printing that focus specifically on multiple colors, registrations, and bleeds? Leave a comment.
Want a copy of the Illustrator (CS) file I worked on above? Download it here (.zip – 2MB). Edit it and send it back to me if you want, show me where I am wrong. (I just whipped this up quickly, not wanting to spend hours doing accurate separations for artwork I never intended to have printed, so remember this file is for illustrative purposes to help me understand screen printing and films.)
