Suddenly... an OverClocked project!

I often reminisced about the time when it was relatively easy for me to get involved in an online community project. Online forums were aplenty then. One community project I took part in was "The Sound of Speed", a music rearrangement  project at OverClocked Remix.

Last weekend I logged in to OC Remix forum on a whim. To my delight, there is an ongoing project for the game "Tetris Attack"! I used to play this game; then many years later recommended it to my wife and spent many weekends playing versus... Plus the game visual style fits the cute look I have been practicing.

So I tried my luck expressing my interest to be involved. And I got an okay! So now I'm happily drawing Tetris Attack images. I will post my works when the album is ready, which is still a long way off. Now please excuse me, I have thumbnails to draw :) 

Painting "Cold Weather"

Final painting

This painting saw me getting sidetracked with fightstick art. It was admittedly hard to get back to painting after fiddling with something physical.

With the word "cold" in the title, I knew the background would be cool colors. The unusual choice was using blue for the girl's clothes as well. Applying warm(er) colors to her face and hair would then make them the focus. The warmest region is Little Star, casting extra warm light pass on the girl's face.

I also tried out limited value range. This was hard. I kept wanting to add darker shadows. I am not certain if this experiment worked. It does give a softer feel to the painting, but not in a striking manner that I wanted.

Fightstick Art

"Cammy" art on Qanba Q1 fightstick

When I posted "Cammy" painting on Reddit, a few people responded that it would look great on a fightstick. I was curious how I could do so but I did not know much about fightsticks. Fortunately, a user with handle "Cringe Dealer 69" was kind enough to share what he knew.

In case you want to know, take a look at "Control Panel Templates" on Focus Attack website. There are so many fightstick brands and models with wildly different aspect ratios, so I went for the model that Cringe Dealer suggested, Qanba Q1.

First thing to do was adapting the painting to Qanba Q1 template: placing the elements to fit a wider canvas and painting any resulting gap. Following Cringe Dealer's suggestion, I added the text label "Menu, Turbo, Mode, Select" for the 4 buttons on upper left corner.

Next came the puzzling bit of info. The fightstick comes with an opaque plastic top. To apply the printed artwork, I need to get a transparent plexi to secure the artwork to the fightstick. This point became clear once I got a fightstick; but I was confused back then and ordered a transparent plexi (which costs around the same as the print cost, effectively doubling what I needed to pay) purely based on trust.

A few weeks later, the plexi and the printed artwork arrived. Note that Focus Attack cut the print according to their fightstick template. Why 2 copies of the print? I would later send one to Cringe Dealer as my thanks for all the knowledge he shared.

Transparent plexi and printed artworks

 Then the fightstick arrived.

 

Qanba Q1 fightstick

At this point, I needed to figure out how to put the artwork on the fightstick. I followed the YouTube video "Modding and Customizing the Qanba Carbon Arcade Fight Stick with Sanwa Parts Tutorial" by Little Dragon Meiling. To my surprise, I had to unplug all button connections.

Button connections before unplugging

Next, peel stickers and glue that cover the 6 screw that secure the top panel on fightstick chassis. After taking off the screws, the top panel can be removed. The buttons were secured on the top panel; so they needed to be removed.

Top panel taken off

Finally, at this point I could place the artwork on the fightstick top, fit the plexi on top of the artwork, and secure them on the chassis. Then it was simply re-attaching the buttons and re-plugging the connections.

Fightstick after reassembling

I could not help wondering why it was so hard to apply a custom artwork on Qanba Q1. From what I understand, this model is a cheaper model. Apparently higher end models allow easier custom artwork replacement.

More shots of the fightstick below.