I frequently keep up with the going’s on at the BYOAC forum (Build Your Own Arcade Controls). People use the forum to talk about, get help for and document every imaginable issue related to the collecting, restoration and rebuilding of arcade games. This includes something called MAME (Multiple Machine Arcade Emulator) which allows someone to build a custom arcade cabinet and then play any arcade game ever produced like it was a real arcade machine. Every once in a while someone posts something that catches my interest from an artwork standpoint. A guy I will only ever know as “eds1275″ started a project to build a cabinet for his nephews and their theme was “Limeaid”. He posted his idea for a marquee and kind of ask what everyone thought. Foe some reason I had an idea, so I created a marquee design for him and posted it back. He liked it and after cleaning it up a little I uploaded it for him.

You can view the forum thread about this arcade cabinet here.

I ended up needing to change the layout of my Cowboy Arcade Control Panel and therefore had to redo the Control Panel Overlay Art. Just to remind you, my Arcade Cabinet is patterned after a Tempest game. I got rid of the numbers for player 1 and player 2 and instead rendered the little Atari guys in neon.

Here is the finished Control Panel Overlay with the various buttons and controls mocked up:

The process of creating the neon tube effect is fairly complicated and took me a long time to get right. When I was done I had a process that involved more than a dozen steps and created 9 separate layers in PhotoShop. The whole thing starts with a vector drawing of the neon in Freehand…

To keep the Tempest theme as much as possible I converted the original Tempest Cab artwork to black and white and then turned it into a halftone. This forms the background of the Cowboy Arcade art with the intention that it will look like the Tempest artwork was there and the neon was put on top of it…

Next the Freehand neon outline (outline) is imported and filled with PMS 152 given a gaussian blur of 1…

Then the outline is filled with PMS 172 the selection is contracted 10 and feathered 5 before deleting and then blurring 1. This creates a denser color toward the edge of the tube…

Next a 3 pixel border inside the outline is filled with black, blurred a very small amount and set to 15% transparency. This creates the illusion of there being thickness to the actual tubing…

Now that we have a neon tube with some variation between the internal color and the color at the edges and a hint of the glass, we need this thing to glow. First glow is internal and is the outline filled with PMS 172, blurred 10 and set to screen.

To help our minds complete the illusion that the neon is actually above the background art we need to simulate the holes the neon would come through in a real application. These holes are cut out of the background and also kept as a separate layer to allow for some darkening of the hols after the external glow happens…

To make the neon look like it is lit I expanded the outline by 30, filled with PMS 172 then blurred it 100 and set it to 75%…

Still needed a little more umph, so another outline expanded 30, filled with PMS 172 and blurred 25 then set to 25% and screen…

Finally, we need to darken the background where the neon is not close to it. The easiest way to do this was to select the big blur from two step ago, select the inverse and fill it black then set to 80%…

Also, those holes we cut out of the background are on their own layer and set to 75% and placed above the big blur layer. The PMS 172 and 150 are Oklahoma State University colors.

My father is involved in a non-profit organization that is helping schools develop their Character Education programs. He asked me for a logo (read brand) that would identify the group, look fresh yet professional and be recognizable.

My friend is putting on his own summer camp for his two boys. He has all kinds of stuff planned and he thought they should have a T-shirt to wear during camp. Both he and his boys are into martial arts and his nickname is “Mojo” so using those elements I came up with this:

Our next door neighbor mentioned one day that she has always wanted a labyrinth to walk. Since we live on a large circular cul-de-sac we have the room to create one in the center of the public drive area, so we started planning.

A little research led us to decide on a 11 circuit Chartres labyrinth. The entire labyrinth will be 54′ in diameter and each path will be 20″ wide with 4″ borders. The installation will involve drilling a hole in the center to accept a pin that will be used to create the circular lines so we can work a little at a time and always return to the same center point. we will also drill holes at the edges of the four quadrant lines. Then we can use a very large compass (circle drawing device) to draw the lines. It should not be difficult, just time consuming

Research conducted at the Harvard Medical School’s Mind/Body Medical Institute by Dr. Herbert Benson has found that focused walking meditations are highly efficient at reducing anxiety and eliciting what Dr. Benson calls the ‘relaxation response’. This effect has significant long-term health benefits, including lower blood pressure and breathing rates, reduced incidents of chronic pain, reduction of insomnia, improved fertility, and many other benefits. Regular meditative practice leads to greater powers of concentration and a sense of control and efficiency in one’s life. Labyrinth walking is among the simplest forms of focused walking meditation, and the demonstrated health benefits have led hundreds of hospitals, health care facilities, and spas to install labyrinths in recent years.

A friend of mine is a free lance writer and an expert on wine. He writes about wine, thinks about wine, drinks wine and subsequently knows a lot about wine. But he is not a wine snob. In fact, he thinks if you want to drink a $10 bottle of wine that is great and he can tell you what the best bottle of wine for $10 is and where to get it.

He is developing an iPhone app and ask me to create an icon. He is calling himself the Wine Reverend. So, I took the idea of a reverend and the associated space which led to stained glass which led to a stylized bunch of grapes made of purple wine bottle bottoms and a stained glass surround made of the colors that the client said he liked.

Our Sunday School class has an annual men’s activity where we go out and shoot skeet and eat breakfast. I decided to design a shirt:

Design 1 is fairly straight forward. Design 2 was a little more controversial

One of my best friends got me started building my own MAME arcade (Cowboy Arcade) and he has a multi-cade of his own. Unfortunately, these often come with cheesy graphics. He is also a Punisher fan (he even has a Punisher skull on the hitch cover on his BMW X5 and on the back of his iPhone! So I designed new side graphics for his arcade cabinet and found an original Punisher Arcade marquee. We haven’t done the install yet, so pics of the actual machine will be added later.

My best friend is an expert in the field of reading readiness improvement. He trains teachers to help students who are reading below their grade level to improve. He is going to start an online resource for this and asked me to design a brand logo. We wanted something that evoked growth and was tied to reading. It also needed to be simple and clean and web friendly. This is the result:

It is Christmas card time again. This year I am only doing ours and my parents. Last year my Grandfather passed away and I created one last card in his memory. It makes me sad to be in this season and not be making a card for him.

Each year Rebecca (my wife) writes our card text. She is very creative and always comes up with a unique and fun way to let people know how and what we are up to as a family. We get a family pic taken, which could be the subject of a reality TV show. Then I design and print a card based on the pic and her text.

This year we wore orange and brown and she wrote an acrostic to the word “Blessings” so I came up with this:

I added the “2010″ to the ball on the front, removed the reflection of the photographer from the multiple balls on the inside, and did some hue and saturation manipulation to get all the colors to match.

My parents arrange to get a picture of the whole family each year also. Of course, the only ones they are actually interested in are the grandchildren, but they us in the pic too. Then my mom sends me the pic and a verse and says, “I don’t have any ideas, whatever you come up with will be fine.” So I do and it is:

For the front I used a rustic window pic that I had to add a pane to on the right. Then I clipped out the glass so I could have the pic show through in a frosted glass effect. Throughout the card I tried to pull colors from the pic and give it a Christmas look without it being red and green. On the back I always make a diagram of the photo with the names of each person for all the people on my mom’s list that don’t see her grandchildren very often.