September 14 2009
Ice Cold Beer: The Side Art
Tagged Under : ICB, Ice Cold Beer, Reproduction, Side Art, Taito, This Old Game, thisoldgame.com
A couple of months ago I was talking with Chris Rhoades (Chris25810) and he was still trying to locate an Ice Cold Beer that had salvageable side art so it could be scanned and reproduced so that he could complete his own restoration (Be sure to read Chris’s blog post about his Ice Cold Beer restoration). I casually mentioned that if he lived in Michigan that I knew of two for sale. Next thing I knew we were in discussions on purchasing one of the machines and making this project a reality.
A few weeks later Ice Cold Beer arrived at my house and it was time to stop talking and start moving forward.
As you can see, the side art is in pretty nice shape so it is a good candidate for this particular task.
The scanner I used was on loan so I figured it was best to not use it upside down so I laid the cabinet on a couple of 2×4’s. After the cabinet was pretty secure and I knew it wasn’t going to trash any equipment (or my toes) I slid the scanner (with the lid removed) under the cabinet and shimmed it up as needed to make sure the scanner was flat against the artwork. I came up with this idea from Rich Lint from thisoldgame.com and I must say it worked great! It took about 8 passes to scan the side art @ 600 DPI.
If you want to learn more about this process be sure to visit Jeff Rothe’s blog @ www.rotheblog.com. He has a great article titled “Scanning Arcade Game Sideart” along with links to other great tutorials on this particular subject.
It took some time but I was able to cleanly tile the artwork together in PhotoShop CS4.
The original plan was to bring this into Illustrator and fully vector the art and use the halftones as needed. But when when you look at the original art there is a lot more halftones than we originally anticipated so we decided to fully retouch the artwork and go from there.
Retouching can be very time consuming but recreating these halftones in Illustrator can be next to impossible to recreate. From what I’ve retouched so far I believe we are headed in the right direction.
Because of all the colors silk screening really isn’t an option. However, Rich at thisoldgame.com has agreed to digitally output these on his solvent inkjet using 4 mil vinyl. Rich has also agreed to do a silkscreened clear overtop of the digital output like he did on the Journey Side Art Project (available for purchase on his site) so you know the finished product is going to look great.
Here is a sneak peak of a few tests that Rich ran this weekend. Now to finish the other 2/3rd’s of the retouching!
The side art set will be available at thisoldgame.com and we expect the price will be about $75.00 per set. I have at least a good 2-3 weeks of retouching but expect to see this in production within the next couple of months (so time to dig your old dusty Ice Cold Beers out of storage)!
What are the differences here in the test prints? I am assuming color tests based on what I see….is that right?
I sent Rich two files to output. I was playing around with a couple of retouch FX’s and wanted to know if it made a difference. Obviously, you can’t tell from the photo. 😀