For printed materials, you need to take several things into account. The main issue being, if you plan to use preexisting art assets, they need to be of a sufficient quality that they will look decent when blown up to cab size. Most media you find on the web, be it art, photos, drawings, or whatever, is saved at 72dpi, or 72 dots per inch. This is the standard dpi for images displayed on a computer screen. Print quality typically starts at 300dpi though, and goes up from there, with 600dpi being very popular for commercial work. What this means for us though is that an image that may look good at 72dpi, is going to be over 3 times smaller when printed out at 300dpi. So your 40" x 20" 72dpi side-art is going to actually print out at about 9.5" x 5"; obviously not what we're looking for.
So with that in mind, you need to make sure your art assets will print out to the right size at a minimum of 300dpi. Preexisting assets of this size and quality though can be hard to find, because they simply don't exist in most cases, and the ones that do are usually a part of someones collection and they won't want to part with them (and those that do may want money for them). The solution to this issue lies in creating new assets as a vector base image.
Almost all photos and art you'll find on the web are raster based images. This means the images are made up of discreet, individual pixels. If you try and blow up this art too much, you'll start to see the pixels, and this won't do for high-quality cab art. The alternative to raster images are vector images. Vector images use math to define the shape and colour of an image, so you can enlarge a vector image as much as you want, and the edges will still stay sharp and pixelation won't occur. In essence they are dpi independent. The downsides to vector images is that you can't create truly photorealistic images with them, so typically vector art is used when creating stylized, hand-drawn images. This usually isn't a problem for cab-art though, as most is in fact hand-drawn art that will convert very well to a vector image. File sizes are also much more manageable in vector images as well, as a high-quality raster image of the size needed for high-quality printing can go into the hundreds of megabytes, wheres an equivalent vector image could be less than 5 megabytes.
I'll post an example below. I created a Futurama themed MAME-cab several years ago, and I made all the art in Adobe Illustrator as a vector image. I imported scans of the inner DVD sleeves from one of the seasons of the show, stitched the images together, and then loaded them into Illustrator. I then used Illustrators tools to recreate the the art as vector lines and paint cells. It took a while, but the results were worth it. Now that it's a vector image, I could print it out as a 500 foot banner if I wanted, and the image would stay crisp and free of pixelation. I've also included a link to my original Illustrator file, so those with the software can take a look if they want.
Click To Download Illustrator File
Now, saying all that, you have three options. One, create or find your raster based art at sufficient resolution and dpi suitable for printing. Two, teach yourself a vector image program and create your own art. Third, pay someone to create vector art for you. Each has their pros and cons, but each may serve you. I'd advocate teaching yourself a vector image program, as they're not overly complex, and the process is fun too!
Edited by Spellbot5000, 04 July 2013 - 04:58 AM.
It would be just so much easier to get started if I got a working project as a guide.
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