December 02 2009
Ice Cold Beer: The Side Art – Part 2
Tagged Under : Artwork, ICB, Ice Cold Beer, Reproduction, Side Art, Taito, This Old Game, thisoldgame.com
It’s been a few months since starting the Ice Cold Beer side art project was started but the artwork is officially off to Rich at This Old Game for production. When Chris Rhodes and myself originally took on this project I thought it would be a fairly easy project but I was wrong. The original plan was to vector the art. However, after talking to Rich about the final medium (Solvent Ink Jet with Screened Clear Coat) it came apparent that all the halftones were going to be next to impossible to recreate by vectoring the art and retouching in photoshop was the best way to start.
So, I started retouching the scanned side art.
Then I dropped the flattened photoshop document into illustrator CS4. In Illustrator I imported another raster file which was only the black line work from the side art (Bitmap Tiff). This allowed me to have more control over solid files such as the the dress, Tatio Logo, etc.
To help Rich with color matching he sent me a color calibration sheet from his plotter. From there, I matched the colors using the color swatches from the calibration sheet and created a color guide for Rich to work from.
I’ve been working on and off over three months I’m 99.9% sure the artwork is ready for production. I’d say I have well over 40-60 hours into scanning, tiling the artwork together, adjusting, retouching, vectoring and color matching. I way under estimated the time it would take to do this but I must say that I’ve learned a lot since I started the project and have a much better appreciation on what it takes to reproduce artwork for our classic games.
The artwork has been sent off to Rich to start production and we should have some samples within the next couple of weeks so stay tuned for more updates from me and Rich!
Awesome!! I know that was a lot of work. Good idea to mix raster and vector. How did you learn to use Illustrator? I’m starting up my first project and I haven’t decided whether to buy a book or search the internet. I know Photoshop well and have used Illustrator but I’m not the best with the pen tool 🙂
Well give Rich Lint credit for the idea to mix raster and vector. The problem you have with solvent ink jet is that the only easy way to recreate the halftones to scan, retouch and incorporate in the vector file. From my discussions with Rich the halftones can be recreated in screen printing much easier but the printing process takes many more steps than ink jet.
As far as learning Illustrator and the best way to learn? Well, I’m a Adobe Freehand guy but unfortunately I’ve been forced to move over to Illustrator and still in the learning stages of the software. In my opinion, Freehand is a little easier and less clumsy. However, that could be due to the fact that I learned on Freehand. Illustrator has much better integration with other Adobe products so it’s really a no brainer on what’s the best way to go nowadays. To answer your question? I’d just start searching google for tutorials on Illustrator and try to get as efficient as possible with the Pen tool.