First Post - Cabinet Art Suggestions

[- r e n d e r -]

Hey all,

I've been lurking here for a while, but this is my first post.  I finally decided to start working on my first cabinet, but I thought that I'd check here for some comments/suggestions on my artwork ideas.  This is the tentative design for the side art.  All the tan areas here would be a natural birch finish, which I will just clearcoat to keep it light....then I will paint the character by hand in black.



If I ever come up with a name for this thing, I will probably place that in the large black area below Chun-Li by masking it out to leave the natural finish.  Any thoughts on this design?

Also, anyone have any ideas for the marquee?  I'm torn on how I should handle the color scheme.  My cp will be natural wood and all the joysticks and buttons are red or black.  Would a red/black marquee look awful against the wood?  

And finally....just to save time in doing any more design work on this, I thought that I'd use the same image on both sides.  Still, it would probably be cooler to use a different character for the opposite side....or at least another pose of Chun-Li.  Again, any thoughts?  All comments/ideas are welcome.  Thanks!

Kerry

[Felsir]

First: welcome to the boards!

I really like your cab design. I would go for ChunLi in another pose for the opposite side, but that's my opinion.

Question about your CPO: will it also be white-tinted birch wood? It would make the design feel very clean overall.
In order to keep it from being a all black-and-white cab, red joysticks and buttons would look nice. I think red lettering on a black-and-white background would look fine as marquee. If you use the red colours carefully this will be a great looking cabinet!

[Witchboard]

I like the idea.  I think it would look very sophisticated with the natural wood and the contrasting paint.

[mahuti]

From a composition / design perspective, I would attempt to get the the left arm (chun-li's left) into the picture a bit more... just a bit. Right now, the post looks a bitstrange, with that disembodied hand floating down.

You could rotate the image just a bit to allow some more room for the arm.  

[walls83]

I really like the style of it.  I agree about the hand.

[SpamMe]

I think it'll look nice. Thought about staining the wood instead of painting?

[walls83]

Something you could do for the marquee is get a photoshop wood style that matches your wood grain and use it for the background

[Generic Eric]

If you haven't cut the wood yet, you should leave the spot for her knee.  It would give your cabinet some character i think.

Additionally, I think you should add the poor girls foot.  I'd say do something about her elbow, but I am more of a leg man, so i don't care about the arm.

[- r e n d e r -]

Thanks for the replies and advice, guys!

Felsir: Yes, the cp is going to be natural birch.  I was trying to figure out a way to do that while still hiding the trackball mounting plate (ie, not using one), but it doesn't seem like that's going to work out.

SpamMe:  My original idea was simply to stain the wood darker, rather than using black paint.  However, there are a lot of reasons that I abandoned that.  Firstly, the stain would almost certainly need to be applied with a stencil, which is a huge job.  With paint, I at least have the luxury of sketching in pencl first because I can totally hide that.  Stain might not be so forgiving.  Furthermore, all of the T-Molding is going to be black, as are most of the controls.  I thought that black on the sides would tie it all together.

generic_eric: Originally, I painted her foot in, but I decided to cut it out.  I think that it's simply more interesting from a design perspective to have the little swoosh thing there and, ultimately, the name of the cab in the black space there.

Walls83:  Yeah, I like that marquee idea.  I had thought about that a bit, but I couldn't come up with a nice layout.  My roommate has a 6+ megapixal camera, so I could just grab the texture from my own wood, once I put some poly on it.  I think the big sticking point now is just going to be coming up with a name, as the marquee really depends on that.

Everyone else  : Yeah, I agree that the floating hand seems weird.  I played around with her positioning a lot, but I didn't really come up with a good solution.  I'm not really convinced that it matters though.  When you think about it, NO ONE is really ever going to be looking at this thing straight on.  The top of her head is probably about eye level for me and I'm 6'.  Since I'd be looking down to where her hand is, chances are that the CP would obscure it almost entirely anyway.  I will have to experiement with it further though.

Kerry

[- r e n d e r -]

See what a little work in Photoshop can do?  In case you don't know, I borrowed this pose from a character sheet of Chun Li from SF Alpha.  I absolutely hated that left hand anyway, so I gave her a new one.  Also, mahuti's suggestion, I also rotated her a bit to get some more of the arm in there.  I'm a lot happier with this and I think that it goes a long way to solving the "disembodied hand" look of the first one.  What do you think?



Kerry

[walls83]

The name is all you man.  Your the only one that can come with a name for your own arcade.  One thing I might suggest is(if your using the chun-li graphics on both sides) you use it on the marquee to tie everything in in.


also one question are you painting chun-li on the sides or is that a graphic?

[- r e n d e r -]

I'm going to paint it.  I don't think a print would really work.  I'd have to cut the whole thing out to get the effect that I want and that would be even more tedious than painting it.  Plus, it might just look bad.  If I paint it and it looks bad....well, at least it'll be cheaper  

[- r e n d e r -]

Here's a possibility for the opposite side of the cab.  There are one or two things that I don't like about this, but they are minor.  One thing I would probably do is repaint her eyes on one side so that they match.  I can't decide which ones I like better though.

[Felsir]

Great stuff! :-) Can't wait to see the finished cab!