My marquee and unfinished side art

[Timstuff]

Hi, I'm new here, and I felt like showing some of my artwork that I hope to use on my arcade machine. First, I'll show my Marquee.



I made the text using adobe illustrator, and I colored it in photoshop. I traced the characters from the actual game sprites using illustrator, and once I got coloring I was satasfied with I put a glow effect around them. The backdrop came from mamemarquees.com. Now, onto my side art, which isn't finished yet. I plan on using an alternate image for the left side of the machine, but I haven't decided what it will be yet.



Even though he's never been in an arcade game, I decided that Solid Snake would be best canidated to put on the right side of my cabinet. I took a scan of the box art from the origina Metal Gear featuring the Michael Beihn lookalike Snake, and traced it in illustrator. Now, I'm coloring it in photoshop. I suppose that soemday I could make a shaded version that's 100% vectors, but I haven't gotten that good at coloring in illustrator yet, so for now I am just coloring a very hi-res non-vector version.

Any thoughts/comments?

[Nocturnaloner]

Great job on the marquee.  I really like how you shaded the letters, and your color choices.  My only suggestion would be to try making the inner silhouettes of the figures a bit darker, maybe just the bottom color of the gradient, to make them stand out more.

The side art looks fine to me so far, looks like a lot of work!  Just make sure to have some elements in common with the marquee for consistency.

Looking good, and good on you for taking on an original theme!

[AceTKK]

I agree with the poster above me on both points; the lettering in the marquee needs something to set it off from the background just a little bit. Maybe a thin, white stroke on the outside edges would do the trick?  Also, it seems odd that the marquee and side-art are of a different style and seem unrelated to each other.  The marquee has a futuristic, space-technology feel which is inconsistent with the cartoony, bright style of the sideart.   All in all I really like your marquee and your artistic style.

-Ace-

[Timstuff]

I took some of the suggestions you guys made about the marquee and updated it. But I think I might need to revise it again because, as you pointed out, the "high tech" look would clash a bit with my "classic" theme that I want to do with the sideart. I think I'll want to keep the logo though.



Also, even though I didn't have intentions to use it, I expirimented with a Mortal Kombat themed control panel overlay for practice a few days ago.



There are a variety of reasons why I wouldn't want to use it with my cabinet, but I at least had fun making it.

[AceTKK]

the marquee looks awesome now d(' ')b

-Ace-

[Timstuff]

Although I'm not completely abandoning my photoshopped version of Snake, right now I'm playing around with coloring it in Adobe Illustrator. The advantages there would be that I could keep the whole thing as a vector file, and I could get it to look a bit more like it was silke screened rather than printed right on. I'll see which version I think is coming out better and then decide which one I want to finish.

[scottp]

Tim, if you end up printing this at mamemarquees.com  I can supply the backdrop in its original higher dpi version.

Regards.

Scott
www.mamemarquees.com

"BYOAC" - 10% Off coupon for BYOAC members 

[Timstuff]

Well, I'm making progress on my all-vector version of Solid Snake. Personally, I think that it's coming out much better than my photoshopped version. I'm quite pleased with how it's turning out. The hardest part was the actual coloring, but shading is much easier than in Photoshop and I think the results will look much better on my machine, since it looks more like it's been silk screened.

[walls83]

Ive always liked the new version of Solid.

http://mgs.gry-online.pl/mgs2/fanart/sol-snake.jpg

I like the style of art.


As far as it looking silk screened I think that has more to do on the style of art the pic was drawn in.

Looking good so far though.

[Timstuff]

Yeah, don't get me wrong, Solid Snake's current design kicks a. But I wanted to go a bit more oldschool than that, so I chose to go with the Michael Beihn lookalike version instead.

[darktemp]

I think you made the right decision, looks great!  Looks much closer to what would have been seen on a late 80's arcade game.

I don't much care for the marquee because it's such a different art style.  I think it would look great with a commando marquee (or similar).  Maybe slip a word in and call it quarter commando or something.

[Timstuff]

An alternate marquee will be in the works soon. Since the theme of my cabinet is sort of mixed-retro, I was considering using Illustrator to do up some space ship images and making a space dogfight-themed marquee. I did up some sketches and went over one of them with vectors. However, I've been toying with the idea of making the marquee be Wing Commander themed, if I can find some traceable images of the ships from the original games. I will probably keep the VideoCaster X logo, but I'll likely re-color it using illustrator to match the silk-screened look of the other art.

[Timstuff]

I'm starting to think that the Wing Commander theme might not work out, because all of the images of the ships on the web are too low resolution to trace, unless it's from 3, 4, or Prophecy, but that's not quite old school enough to match my cab's theme. But, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with my own generic ships. Here's one that I did on friday using Illustrator, not-yet-colored.