Bubble Bobble / Puzzle Bobble Neon Sign art

Pacman, Hamburgers and Shakes, Bubble Bobble, arcades - I tried a bit of everything.

The best thing ever happened.  I made a neon sign.  Well, I didn't do that, because making a neon sign requires glass bending skills, a workshop, and a black belt of ninja art mastery, while I only have a green belt in looking at art.

I designed a neon sign.  Here's how I started.

I built a bunch of sketches around the concept.  I used a bunch of classic arcade/Diner bits and tried to incorporate what he wanted in simple thick elegant line work so the bender wouldn't have a helluva time.


So the guy I was designing for, he liked on in particular, so I turned it into a slightly cleaner sketch, which you can see here.  He loves Bubble Bobble / Puzzle Bobble.

Bob and Bub pictured, because they're awesome and they provided a great color palette

 After everything was built to his liking, I took the work into illustrator to model it perfectly.  It also gave me one more opportunity to play with the size or the glass in comparison to the mass of the sign.

I wanted the thing to look nice and thick/dense with 15mm glass at the size it was to be manufactured.

The sign didn't have that in stock though and we had to go with 13mm.

We picked the sign up the other day and I snapped a few photos of it.  It came out really nice.  In person you can see the colors and they're a bit nicer, but in the iPhone photos, the bloom is a bit impossible to photograph.

Here are my favorite pictures.

A closeup of the neon so you can see all the connective bits.

Obligatory depth of field shot and the colors are pretty close in this one although it's still quite blown out.

The finished sign.  You can compare this to the concept sketch and see that it's pretty close, although if you ask me - I can point out several bits that are off.  I designed the thing of course I'd notice them!

Mission accomplished.  I have a few more neon signs concepts designed / planned and I'm hoping to work few some of them and have them at some upcoming art shows in 2014.

cheers,
&Rew.