Finish advice needed from Pros

[stigzler]

Hi Folks,

After 9 months of thinking it would only take 1 more month, finally entering last stages of my build. After all of this time and effort - getting bit anxious that I don't screw it all up with a bad finish!

Cab at the moment:



I am planning to spray paint the interior and front and get vinyl prints for the side art. Also, because of the modular CP design, just thinking needing some heavy duty vinyl or something.

The sprayer:



So a few questions:

1. Spray painting - Onto MDF. See so much differing advice on posts.
I'm in the UK, so what would result in the best finish for the front of the cab?
Do I use primer, and if so oil or water based?
Also, topcoat - what kind of paint? Gloss, Vinyl Satin or what?
Also, any tips for using recommended paints with a paint sprayer?

2. Sideart
Have Inkscape and GIMP. Should I use only vector graphics for the sideart? If use bitmap, will obviously pixelate if original art is small, but would any size/resolution bitmaps be OK? Seems sooo hard to find vector art for arcade use (wanting black/green/blue theme kinda Alien based or something - sure bitmap art would be easier to find)

3. Control Panel
Will just be laying Vinyl onto the modular CP sections - any recommendations on what to use to ensure durability etc? Thinking don't want gloss finish, because would show scuffs/scratches too badly - can you get something with a kinda satin finish?

Thanks in advance,

Steve

[thatpurplestuff]

Others are much more qualified to provide input in regards to painting, but in regards to artwork if you are using raster images (anything non-vector) you'll want everything to be at LEAST 150 ppi when designing it at full size and try to avoid upscaling the artwork at all.  If you can see compression artifacts / pixelation at 100% scale then you will see those same defects once they are printed.  Personally (and keep in mind I am most definitely more picky about resolutions than most people since I design stuff all day for a living) I would only go with vector art since you will be hard pressed to find raster artwork that would be large enough for this purpose.  That being said there are plenty of people that have created their own art using raster images and are perfectly happy with the results, so it really just depends on how picky you think you will be regarding image clarity.

Here are a couple sites with arcade vector art libraries:
http://arcadeartlibrary.com/arcade_art/
http://vectorlib.free.fr/

[stigzler]

Thanks purple - really helpful - looking overall like best to use vector. However, have browsed through those links before and nothing that really suits my cab

Feels like vector art is quite hard to find.... an ongoing difficulty.

Had quite look into creating vectors from rasters - gonna have to put a lot of time into that I'm thinking...because initial experiments in inkscape didn't turn out so well...

thanks for your help