I've been holding back a bit hoping someone will go before me as I'm completely stymied regarding artwork but I owe you'se guys an update so here goes.
Here's (below) the cabinet as it sits today. I still need to mount the wheels and volume control, and wire the CP and coin door and a few other "small" tasks (heh). I'm happy to be moving away from painting at this point though, which started off being a frustration but ended up being more fun toward the end because I was getting good and repeatable results out of my setup. This was my first time working with HPLV and I'm glad that I took the time to try it out.
ARTWORK. I have a few hundred to spend on artwork design (not printing, design work only) and it feels like this might buy me a slightly better-than-average Photoshop design using existing vectored characters and backgrounds and such but nothing custom, but I won't know until I start actually dealing with the art dudes. FWIW here, I'll be open to suggestions from the designer regarding color scheme and t-molding color and such. I'm planning on getting CPO, marquee, and sides for sure, and maybe the bezel and/or something with the kickplate too.
There appear to be several guys building this cabinet—probably double or triple the number of people posting updates in this thread even. Is there anyone else that is farther along with the design work and such? I wish that I would have been able to commission the artwork before I painted the whole cabinet black (it's pretty ominous as it sits today) but I couldn't make the timing work and had to do something, so I grabbed a quart of BLACK and here we are.
Thanks yet again to OND for the cabinet design. I'm trying to do it justice here, man!
-Gern