Painting artwork is one of the more difficult things when it comes to restorations if you don’t have some niche equipment.
While some arcade machines use printed graphics on vinyl, some use painted on graphics. Luckily, these are usually fairly simple with only a few colors.
Now the difficulty will change greatly depending on how you want to do it. If you still have most of the artwork and just want to repaint it to spruce it up or cover some repaired damage, you can simply use a lot of painters’ tape and masking material and mask off each color using what’s left as a template.
Quick Tip: If painting a new color over a section of a previous color, spray a thin layer of the previous color around the tape/stencil to fill any gaps under the tape and let that dry before spraying the new color.
If you plan on starting fresh with something like a new side or after major damage repair, you will need something like a vinyl cutter. You could attempt to make the stencils by hand from the old artwork, but a vinyl cutter will make everything a LOT easier.
Before doing absolutely anything to the side make sure you go through this full process to make sure your stencils will line up and all be the correct size.
Start by taking a few photos trying to be as square on it as possible.
Now take that photo into an editing software like Photoshop or Gimp and, using separate layers, you can trace out the artwork, separating the layers by color.
Once you are done, it depends on your vinyl cutting software, but you will need to export your stencil layers into your vinyl cutting software and play with the sizing till it all looks correct.
Now cut it out using some stencil vinyl so you can verify that it’s all the correct size. Once you have your stencils, then you can continue with whatever needs to be done before the painting process.
