Custom TMNT Mame cab art - feedback and info appreciated

[jdchubb]

Hey all,
I picked up a pretty beat Vendetta cab and am converting it into a 4 player MAME cab for the kids...I have a Bad Dudes cab I brought back from the dead and turned into a MAME setup, but its a bit limited with 2 buttons only (didnt want to alter the cp).  Anyway, I went back and forth on a few things and eventually settled on wanting to do TMNT art on it, but sourced from the comic art.  My issues come from not really knowing too much about vectored graphics and the printing process and how this stuff will turn out.

What I did was source a few pretty high res scans of comic art and then just use the automatic vectoring within AI...they retained the look pretty well, and scale up to size and still look nice.
Is this a horrible method of doing this and are prints of these going to look like balls?  I can get someone the AI files if they want to take a closer look at them.   Any feedback on this is appreciated...just don't want to waste the money if itll look like crap.

Note that for the sideart I didnt clean up some of the title that will fall outside of the actual side art area..so thats still there.  Also, converting this stuff down to crappy jpgs left white spots in a lot of areas which arent on the actual images..mostly noticeable on the sides.

If it isnt obvious from the above, this is my first experience with trying to create this kind of art for an arcade or using AI in general....

If I can't go with this setup, Ill probably go with the simpsons art thats already floating around out there and just alter the CP art to fit my custom setup.

Thanks!
Jesse

[yotsuya]

Love the sides, I'd straighten out the logo on the marquee because there's really no reason why it needs to be crooked, Control Panel seems pretty good, but I'd love to see something that didn't have the characters on it since you already have them on the sides. Somebody did one with a manhole cover a few weeks ago that I thought was pretty awesome. On the whole, I think it's pretty nice. Goodt job for first try.

[opt2not]

I concur with my homie yotsuya.  Straighten out the logo on the marquee, and I'd see what you can do about the sides as well. 

Personally I tend to shy away from putting a logo on the sides, since the main purpose of marquee is really to display the title, and the sides are for graphics display. (See AlienInferno's Battletoads cab ) But you might opt otherwise, if so, I'd see if you could make the side logos straighter, and perhaps integrate them a bit more into the image as they feel like a tacked-on afterthought.
As for the Marquee, bigger bolder logo, so it really stands out. I'd go at least 2/3 of the image be taken up by the logo.
Don't concentrate so much on the graphics of Shredder being the focus here, Marquees are supposed to have a big and bold title, something that makes the cab stand-out among the others and is easily legible from at least 10 feet away.

I've always love the grittiness of the TMNT comic art, and I'd see what you could do to make the logo just as gritty.  The white thick outlines are too clean IMO.

Like it's been said, good start! 

[jdchubb]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

As for the logo - I originally had the comic logo on there..which is a little more 'plain', but for sure more in line with the gritty comic art.  After I had it on there though I felt like I had to leave something that at least related to the game/cartoon at the time the game came out.  A friend of mine alternative suggested I just black/white the actual logo.  I can mock them both up and see how they look.

For the sides, I did want to extend the art all the way up but with that comic cover art on the side I just literally ran out of vertical real estate to use...so I faded it to black and put the logo.

The control panel was where I probably was most torn.  I really wanted to do something per stick w/ the turtles, and I had seen a few mock ups while searching of a sewer cover with the ooze coming out and a baby turtle w/ the corresponding colors @ each stick going toward the ooze, which I loved but it didnt quite fit the comic theme.

[jdchubb]

Heres the marquee with the comic logo..using one of the colors thats been used on the comics, all I really did was a bit of a drop shadow to it.  Thoughts?  I was gonna center it, but I kinda like it off to the left like that with Shredder on the right