the restoration continues ...ok, you've all read what happened to my pac-man stencil job. here's how it came about and what happened next ...
let's warp back in time
here's where we left off: the blue color has been applied
after sitting in a warm room for about a week, i'm carefully removing the stencils
looking good for the most part, although there are some rough edges here and there which normally should be totally straight
and then there are spots like this
(you've seen that picture before, but i wanted to show it again)
nevertheless - after some touch ups - i continue with the second color:
RED! the instructions on the stencils tell me what to do: align the red stencil with the registration marks from the blue stencil
like this
difficult to get a 100% match because of the sheer size of the stencils, but i was told it's going to work well with some tolerance!
after some careful alignment, i'm fixing the vinyl to the cabinet
as you can see, well within tolerance limits!
and here's the cabinet, already protected for the upcoming paint job in my temporary paint booth
from the outside
from the inside
although i had prepped the floor of the paint booth much better this time, the paint job still created a mess on my floor
and on my shirt
my dusk mask - check out those filters!
i guess i would be dead by now if i hadn't worn it
of course-
HE couldn't stay out of it!
back into the warm room with the cabinet for a couple of days to dry completely
time to remove those red stencils!
you can already spot the name of the game
but in other areas, the blue paint gets lifted off in huge chunks
but i'm not giving up, because the last color -
black - is supposed to cover huge parts of the
red and the
blue. so let's apply the last set of stencils!
the left side
the front
swallow this, pac-man
after the first layer
and some layers later
which color was that again?
after more drying time in the well-known warm room
, i'm removing the black stencils - and disaster strikes!!!
the front of the cabinet
if that wasn't bad enough, i'm spotting an error in the red stencils: there's red above pac-man's eyes where there should be yellow
i'm masking off the area for manual touch up
and while i'm at it, i'm fixing a problem which was already present on all the original pac-man cabinets - can you spot it?
NO? here's a close-up of the erroneous area
see it now? right, the C is missing the red color at the bottom. because this is a very delicate paint job, i have to make a stencil for it and in order to do so, i'm copying the shape on a sheet of paper
with the help of that template, i can cut the corresponding stencils by placing the template on top of blue painter's tape
the hand-made stencil on location (not 100% fixed though)
now i can simply paint away without having to worry about spills
the end result
you might be wondering: "what about the rest of the cabinet?"
well, i had three options:
(1) strip down the cabinet completely and apply vinyl
(2) strip down the cabinet completely and start the paint job from scratch
(3) try to touch up the cabinet as good as possible
i decided against (1) because although vinyl isn't too difficult to apply and looks nice, it simply isn't original
i decided against (2) because it would have meant throwing away everything i had done so far without knowing whether it was going to work out the next time
PLUS: both (1) and (2) would have cost me a few hundred bucks - AGAIN
so i decided to go with (3) because if it didn't look fair enough, i could still go with either (1) or (2)
for the last couple of days (thank god it's the school holidays right now) i've been manually touching up the entire cabinet artwork, which means taping off certain areas and trying to correct the damages with a tiny brush! since i don't have the color in paint cans, i have to spray the colors into small cups first
the job seems to be taking forever, because i always have to wait for the individual colors to dry before i can go on with the next one!
after a lot of struggle and hardship here's my pac-man where it stands right now
don't get me wrong, it looks totally nice on the picture, but in reality, you can see where i touched up the cabinet if you look closely, but this has reached a point where i can totally live with the results. right now, i'm waiting for some copyright message stencils from brian (gamestencils.com). those weren't included in my stencil set and brian kindly cut me a couple of those - they are on their way to germany as we speak. after those have been applied, i'm going to protect the entire paint job with some coats of clear to (a) give the entire artwork a nice finish (b) even out the touched up parts (c) protect the paint job from more paint "falling off".
compared to where i was some days ago, this is like heaven and hell, day and night, asterix and obelix
@etienne: can i change my avatar now?
to be continued ...
