This is a recreation of a prior blog posting. I deleted three blog postings recently that I felt embarrassed by, but after thinking about it, I don't see why I should shy aware from this post in particular so here it is again. I made an Adobe Illustrator .ai file which held the seven fruits from 1982's Ms. Pac-Man in a vertical progression with denotations for how many point values the fruits were worth in game. The idea was taken from in-game artwork and also some very similar artwork for the cabinet of the arcade game which I've run across in Googling. Here is a raster rendering of the vector shapes:
In looking at an .eps of the shapes, one will be able to tell that many of the complex shapes are in fact made by having several shapes sit on top of each other first to then get grouped together as a whole. For example, if you ungroup the pretzel in Adobe Illustrator and drag from the middle of the left edge upwards, you should be able to drag a chunk of a pretzel beneath the other parts upwards and away from its playmates like so:
You will note that the shapes overlaying the piece we moved utilize some trickiness in the name of creating the illusion of a stroke around a single shape that somehow goes under the shape's fill at times. Obviously, this effect is completely faked. A brown shape with no stroke used to overlay the bit we moved and a second shape that has a stroke but no brown fill sits on top of the brown shape without a stroke and extends a smidge farther towards the upper left than the shape it sits over. This stroke shape is longer than the fill shape and independent from it for if we had just one shape there can be some nastiness in which a piece of a fill peaks out over a stroke on the shape below if its own stroke is broken. By broken, I mean having loose, visible ends as opposed to a stroke that is in, for example, a circle. To break a stroke, select a vertex and delete it outside of the pen tool for explicitly safely deleting vertexes. An unbroken shape will suddenly become a line with two distinct ends. You may need to splice in a new vertex to delete in the name of getting the effect you crave. I like to both show the grid and snap to the grid in the name of lining things up precisely. This really helps if you need to make two sides of a shape symmetrical. Make shapes overtop of other shapes on new layers initially and then flatten the layers together. Then group. Another good trick is to duplicate a shape onto a second layer and then make two different surgical edits on the two different layers so that the twins grow apart in form. You will find working with the grid and layers to be restrictive and challenging. You will find it impossible to make even the simple stuff I show off here without some upfront planning and creative problem solving, but that is just the nature of the vector graphics game. You will also need to make shapes you will not keep. These will be used to truncate the shapes you do want or to punch holes in them. The shapes you don't keep get subtracted from the ones you are to keep in the name of hammering them into shape. The example I show ultimately ended up as a tattoo on my back:
Credits:
- original tattoo by "Mike Pain" at Atomic Tattoo (5533 Burnet Road, Austin, TX 78756) on 2/8/2014
- touch-ups by Bobby Baker at Skin Art Gallery (4297 Beltline Road, Addison, TX 75001) on 3/29/2014 and 5/3/2014 and 5/18/2014
- photo by Matt Underwood on 10/5/2014
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