Boardwalk Arcade part 31-finished

Today's plan was to finish coloring the first okawara proof, the first in the edition. There wasn't that much left to do beyond finally making some decisions.

First on my list today was to finish the video game in the background of the right side. The game is an Asteroids machine, hugely popular back in the day. The screen graphics were very primitive by today's standards- the asteroids were irregular polygons of specific shapes, white lines on the black screen. I could have cut something like that, but that combined with the mostly black cabinet would have be too much solid black. So I made the decision to cut out the whole screen and deal with the problem later. At the last Studio critique group Molly had suggested collaging something in there, like a clipping from a magzine or something. (Molly has never met a piece of paper she wasn't willing to collage into one of her own artworks) I've done collage before on occasion, but I wanted to keep these prints consistent and somewhat traditional. Still, this called for something a little different. I first colored the whole screen indigo, sort of a colorful dark gray. Okay, but dull. This kind of paper wouldn't permit me to hand paint the thin lines, though it would let me print thin lines. My solution was to cut a little rubber stamp out of an eraser in the distinctive asteroid shape, hand paint it with white watercolor paint, and stamp on the screen. Reapply and stamp two more times and it's done. It breaks up the indigo space nicely and the identical shapes are another example of pattern in the image.

Another decision was clothing- a few pieces remained to be colored. The second photo shows the decisions I made- naples yellow on the skeeball player's shirt, and the light green I'd used elsewhere for the kid by the prize counter.

The last major decision was the side panel of the pinball machine. I used some scrap paper to pull some light ghost prints of the pinball cabinet with the little bit of ink residue left on the block. Cut these out and colored them to make some quick mock ups of my options. Straight substitution of a cool color for the red, not so good. Switching the white and red, not bad, but still a little confusing. Then I thought to combine the two. Not accurate to this particular machine, but typical of the bold geometric graphics on period pinball machines. Third photo shows the results.

A few other touch-ups after that, and then I was done. I'll look it over in a few days, but I'm pretty sure that this is the final version. As expected, it's fairly similar to the first color proof, but there are some differences. Several figures had colors and/or patterns of clothes changed. Except for a few spots on the pinball machine in the lower right corner, I eliminated all the purple throughout the composition. It just didn't go with the other colors, and what I substituted (all colors already used elsewhere in the print) was always at least as good if not better. I varied the colors in the wall niches holding prizes, to give them more depth. All these changes can be seen in the last photo. I'll color the other proof to match and be ready to start the next one early next month.