Yeah, i figured that's what he meant - I tried both that and illustrator and never got my head around it... for some reason nothing seemed to go where i wanted it to. The whole of the 'vector' section (apart from the text) is a bit foreign to me really - just never had need for it in the past...
Honestly, I don't think anyone should claim they know photoshop if they don't know some of the strengths of using that software. Things like Smart layers, vector shapes, and Styles are three features that everyone wanting to make arcade art should know. I mean, without that you should basically use GIMP and call it a day. I highly recommend you bend a bit and learn these features, 'cause they are pretty powerful as well as helps the image be non-destructive when you're sizing it. When I say non-destructive, I mean being able to change the scale/dpi, etc...and not lose image information/quality or introduce artifacts. So fresh and so clean, clean!
Also, 600 dpi for your control panel is going to annoy the hell out of the guy printing this for you. It's overkill to go that high, and honestly why bloat your file sizes and tax your computer processing when you don't need it to be that way?
I literally just spent 15 mins tracing one of bubble enemies into vectors, using the Ellipse tool (set to Shapes) and added strokes via Layer Styles. The glows from the bubble reflection are also vector shapes with a Outer Glow Layer Style. The only thing raster I used is the shading which really doesn't need to be vectored anyway since it's blurred.
I then added a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer to it, converted it to a Smart Layer and was able to do a non-destructive Transform to scale it up.
Here's a breakdown of what was done.
1. Built the Main Bubble first with the Ellipse Tool, colour set to brown, added a yellow stroke to it via Layer Styles
2. Outer outline was a duplicated Main Bubble, and set underneath. I increased the size of the stroke and changed the colour to brown so that the outline shows outside of the yellow stroke from the Main Bubble.
3. Made the body, again with the Ellipse Tool, then took the Direction Selection Tool (Hotkey=A) and moved the handles a bit to warp the body so it's not a perfect circle. Set the shape to Yellow
4. Created the arms and bow, again with the Ellipse Tool and again edited the shape with the Direction Selection Tool. Added a Brown Stroke via Layer Styles.
5. Did the same thing with the Eyes using 4 Ellipses -- 2 brown, 2 yellow (for the pupils) and deformed it to match the eye shapes.
6. Started a new layer for the Shading, and just used an airbrush to paint it in <--raster.
7. Created two white vector shapes (can be draw with the pen tool, or created through the Ellipse tool) for the reflection highlights and added an Outerglow to them in the Layer Styles
8. Added an Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer to the top of the layer stack, set it to colourize, and gave it a blue tone.
9. Selected all the layers, right-click --> Convert to Smart Layer, and proceeded to Transform Scale it up to the size I need.
10. Double clicking on the smart layer opens it up, so that I could adjust my stroke and glow sizes when at a different scale. Hitting Save updates the Smart Layer in the main file.
That's really it. It took me longer to write up these steps than it was to create the actual image. I've been using Photoshop for a long ass time so something like this is quick for me, but to a novice it shouldn't take you too much longer than this to do the same.
I hope this helps you grow your knowledge of PS, 'cause it's super useful for a lot of things if you plan on going to print with any art you make.
**ALSO: I recommend reading through Malenko's and my tutorials regarding Stroke Styles, Smart Layers etc...
here, and
here. These should give you some ideas on how to create some cool stuff and be able to size it the way you want.