What's the best way to clean-up scanned images for sideart?

[darktemp]

I recently saw the 5 in 1 game with pac-man, bosconian, galaxian etc. in the store and thought the sticker on the controller would work great for the sideart i'm struggling with.  However this is a 4"x3" sticker that would need to be blown up to 24" x 18" roughly.  So I scanned the image in with my not so great scanner and have a "decent" image, how should I go about cleaning this up?

Attached are the scanned pics at about 5% there full size.  There are others if you would like to see them.

[darktemp]

And here is a quick mockup of what I would like to do with them...

[Ravage]

how should I go about cleaning this up?

Well, for the size increase your talking about, you really should trace the artwork in Adobe Illustrator kaing a fully scaleable vector file that, in theory, regardless of the size should look perfect... Handy that you've done huge resolution scans - in fact, with something that small I'd scan at the biggest resolution of my scanner for tracing purposes...

Doesnt look impossible to trace either - but hell of a lot of work involved!

[darktemp]

I might give vectoring a go, I messed with illustrator on prior cpo artwork and couldn't get a handle on it.  Is it just time consuming or is it actually difficult to vectorize images like that?  Looking at them they don't have a lot of detail, except the galaxian but that has been vectorized already with less colors.  I might end up giving that a shot instead of wasting time "cleaning" the image up.  If all else fails I might just have to download one of the many amazing sideart vectors hitting the art library by this ravage fellow lately

BTW, I did scan at 1200 dpi and even 2400 dpi on a couple.  Is there a photoshop filter or tool that will help me get a basis for vectoring?

[Ravage]

there is a path trace tool in AI - never use it myself, but thats cos I never clean up scans 

But if youve decent solid colours its surprising how good it can be

As ever, I have hell of a problem with Photoshop so cant help there