Take one more look at this thing, some FOOL had decided to give the game a nice Flintstone look with house paint and a brush right over the top of the original artwork that you can see remained underneath.

I had no plans to re-paint this as I had earlier success with re-decalling a Black Knight so I decided I would draw new images of this cabinet in Photoshop and get my sign-writer mate to print them for me and simply stick em on.

I was not doing this to be lazy - rather to see if I could draw print and apply decals from scratch - it was an experiment but man I knew it couldn't end up any worse than what it started as when I received it.

I didn't take a whole stack of 'progress photos' but I will highlight different major steps along the way as best as I can.

Obviously in the shot below I had stripped the cabinet - I started with a paint stripper but then moved on to an orbital sander and this STILL took hours and hours to get to this stage, I honestly looked like a member of the Simpson family when I was done and I really wish the wife would have grabbed a photo - I was COMPLETELY yellow !

I had filled and sanded the sides and also grabbed some colour matching paint and gone around all the edges to help the decal joints blend in better ( hopefully )

Here is a very brief look at how I draw in Photoshop.

I am self taught.

I get a nice 'square and flat' image of the actual game cabinet, I then have to adjust it to make it perfectly the same size as a real life cabinet - then , using the pen tool I painstakingly trace every single individual shape as a 'layer' 

To give you an idea of how a re-draw starts see these Power Play cabinet images below, I have to do this for each side and the front and each backbox side too for every game.

Before the image gets to the 'square & workable' stage where you can start to copy / trace it you have to get your original photo and get the cabinet 'square' again as MOST camera's will distort the overall image slightly.

See in the shot below of the Power Play cabinet I have a very thin blue guide line at the bottom right hand corner of the cabinet YET at the front end of the cabinet the corner is miles away from the guide line meaning it is distorted by the camera lens.

So what I do is create a copied layer and 'distort' that layer so it pulls the cabinet 'square' again before I start to trace the image. You should be able to see in the next image that this cabinet is now all straightened up against the guidelines.

After it is all square, the overall image is cropped AND re-sized to the EXACT same size as the pinball machine and the tracing can begin.

Below is an indication of how each 'layer' is drawn, you have to trace each shape on the game.

So in this Genie backbox there would be 14 layers and that includes the yellow background as it's own layer.

I have indicated a single orange layer in the shot below. You could draw the bottom 'cloud's as one big green layer and THEN lay 2 red layers over the top of it.

I hope that gives you a tiny idea of what is involved in these re-draws.

Genie was a fairly simple game to trace - most cabinet re-draws take about 50 hours to complete

I think Haunted House took me about 80 !

( And don't worry fat-guts I have not re-drawn Power Play I am just using it as an example )

Here are some shots of the decals finished, printed and applied to the game

In the next shot I am trying to show you the smoothness of the applied decal

Ande here is a close up look at one of the front corner joints

Righto Righto who spewed on it ?

First I sanded it and re-sprayed the whole thing, I actually ended up spraying a better yellow than what you see in this photo in the end , before I applied the decals.

I also re-sprayed the door surround.

 This machine even got the lamp door cleaned up and re-sprayed

 I think it looks a whole lot better than when I received it now.

Once again my experience when I sold this game was that it pulled some SERIOUS cash from another collector - therefore again proving to me that most pinball guy's don't mind these old games being decaled instead of painted as was my Black Knight experience