Chomping Quarters|

About a year ago I picked up an Pepper II in order to complete my Exidy Row. Unfortunately my Pepper II was pretty trashed and was missing side art. But lucky for me Rick Ford (RoadRunner) was kind enough to loan me his New Old Stock (NOS) side art in order to reproduce the art for my restoration project.

When I received the art months ago the first thing I did was look over the art to decide how I was going to tackle the project. Lucky for me the art was fairly simple and not tons of details. One thing I did notice that unlike Atari art the line work wasn’t very clean and I was very surprised how bad line work was including the rounded corners (if you can call them that). However, it had a lot of character and I knew it was going to be next to impossible to vectorize the line work without loosing the original feel of the art. So, I decided mixing both raster scans with vectorized art was the best way to handle this project.

First, I did a 300 DPI scan of this art and knock out all the color fills and halftones along with some minimal retouching. After I felt the lines were cleaned up as much as possible I converted it to greyscale, then to a bitmap then saved it as a TIF. By saving it this way it allows you to import this image into Illustrator and add vectorized fills behind the black line. The final art will be solvent ink jetted so vectorized fills will give you lots of control when color matching.

After I had the line work imported into Illustrator I added my vectorized fills.

Next I rescanned all the halftones at 600 DPI and also converted and saved each halftone to a bitmap TIF (as I did with the raster line work). This allowed me to import each halftone into the Illustrator document and add a color fill to the halftone.

No Halftone Fills

Black Halftone Fills

Color Matched Halftone Fills

Next I did a little color matching and add a high resolution scan of the “Exidy” logo.

A couple of test prints to make sure the colors were as close as to the original as possible. Be sure to check out the images below comparing both the NOS artwork to the reproduction artwork and I think you’ll agree… It looks great!!!

Original

Reproduction

Original

Reproduction

Original

Reproduction

Original

Reproduction

Original

Reproduction

Original

Reproduction

Original / Reproduction

Original / Reproduction

A great big thank you needs to go out to Rick Ford (RoadRunner) for loaning me the NOS artwork and Rich Lint from This Old Game for help with color matching and printing the artwork.

Unfortunately, my restoration hasn’t been started but at least the side art is now complete and available now!