Chomping Quarters|

After close to a year and a half the Ice Cold Beer side art reproduction project is finally complete!!!

When I originally committed to this project for Chris Rhoades it appeared to be much more straight forward than it actually was. I pretty much figured I’d just scan, tile it together, retouch and print. However, it was much more involved than that.

The most complicated part of this project was “color matching”. Trying to get raster colors and vector colors to match at the same time turned out to be no easy task. I ended up vectorizing close to 80% of the art. Mainly vectorized fills “behind” the 600 DPI black line. Unfortunately, the halftones added some “fun” to this vectorizing process.

The halftones were already retouched so instead of trying to create these halftones from scratch I decided to create several 600 DPI files with the halftone fills and saving them as Bitmap TIFF’s. This was a little trick I’ve discovered years ago. You basically need to eliminate the background color, turn the color image to black and white, adjust brightness / contrast (you might need to play with the levels and curves), turn to “bitmap” then “save” as a TIFF. By doing these steps you can insert this bitmap images into your illustrator file, put a “solid” vector fill behind the bitmap then you can select the bitmap image and fill with a color from the Ice Cold Beer color palette. This turned out to be some of the most useful knowledge in making this project near a perfect match to the original.

Retouched raster file.

Illustrator document with all raster and halftone fills removed.

Bitmap TIFF’s “placed” into Illustrator document.

Bitmap TIFF’s filled with appropriate color from color palette.

Vectorized fills “behind” black line-work and halftone fills.

Solvent Inkjet with screen printed clear coat.

Close up of vectorized Hair, Lips, Eyes, Face and Flower.

Close up of vectorized dress and bow.

Following these steps allowed us to have much more control when color matching seeing we could specify colors from the printers color profile and as you can see, these added steps were well worth the effort!

A great big thanks to Chris Rhoades (Chris25810 from KLOV and CoinOpSpace) and Rich Lint from “This Old Game” for all their help to make this happen!!!

If your interested in purchasing a set of side art for your Ice Cold Beer you can purchase here!!!