Cabinet (Side Art):
Side Art Restoration :
If there's one thing that I like about Williams games, it's the painted sideart. It's durable, pretty, and doesn't peel off around the edges like vinyl sideart often does. On top of that, it's repairable... if you have the patience to do it yourself or enough money to buy the stencils. Some people would prefer to cover this mess with some reproduction vinyl self-adhesive sideart. Sure, an easy fix but it would not be what you would consider cheap and it simply would not look anything like factory original. Vinyl sideart also wouldn't cover dents in the wood and it's even possible that you would see the old painted artwork right through it, even if only to a small degree. I decided from the start that I wanted to restore the painted sideart by re-painting it.
Okay, so now what? Well, I could try the following methods:
1/ Paint the colored shapes by hand with a tiny brush. But that always looks like crap in the end.
2/ I could try using a ton of masking tape and time and do it like this:
This method works but it is very time consuming. Besides, any sanding required to restore gouged or otherwise damaged wood areas will often remove old paint leaving you with no guide lines for those parts.
3/ I could buy self-adhesive stencils. This is a great choice, but can be very expensive, and you can only use them once. You can buy them already made from an arcade art dealer (i.e. http://www.arcadeshop.com) Another advantage of this method is that your new stencils will require no work on your part to make and the scale and details should be accurate.
4/ I could make my own stencils or templates (or mattes as I like to call them) based on the original machine's own existing sideart.
I went with the last option. I made my own mattes. This required a substantial amount of work on my part but in my case it was a lot cheaper than buying stencils and I thought that if I did the job right, the mattes could probably be used again, maybe even a few times, to restore other cabs should the need ever arise.
My first challenge with regards to restoring the sideart was to find a proper set of vector drawing files. I found some files online but they were all wrong. Someone had done a fairly decent job of reproducing the red color shapes, but they really screwed it up on the blue parts. All that other person did was copy and paste the red shapes at an offset position, like a shadow. WRONG! The blue doesn't look like that!
Here's the INCORRECT image:
Making New Sideart Mattes:
Alright, so how did I make my own mattes? Here's how...
First, I set up a digital camera on a tripod and took a picture of the side of the machine. I measured the distances from the camera lense to the machine to be sure that it was square to the machine and exactly at half the height of the machine.
Pretty bland as pictures go, I know, but practical to the purpose. I wanted as flat an image as possible to start with. Granted, no matter what I did, there's going to be a little error caused by warping due to perspective. After all, the top of the machine is farther away from the camera lens than the center of it, but there's nothing you can do about that except take the picture from as far away from the machine as possible. The problem with that obviously being that the farther away the camera is, the less resolution your picture will have.
I used a 5 Mp digital camera and took the picture from about 20 feet away.
I used an advanced photo editing program to perform the transformation of the original photo shown above to end up with the final version that I would eventually use as a tracing image to create a vector drawing of the sideart image.
The first step was simply to crop the picture to isolate the machine itself.
The next step is to clean the image and trim the edges. This is beginning to look flatter and cleaner than the original photo but the colors do not look correct and the sideart shapes look too grainy. A tracing program would generate a lot of tiny jagged shapes if I tried it on this picture.
This picture is ready for tracing. This is what you get after using a "fill" or "paint bucket" tool to convert all of the areas of the photo to simple solid colors. I took this opportunity to correct the colors too.
By the way, while doing this work to this point, I worked only with BMP files. The pictures shown here may look a bit grainy because they are low-res jpeg copies used only for this presentation.
Below is a zoomed-in view of a section of the picture at left:
