We made a lot of progress in 2 days! The backboard has gone from being totally clean and sparkling to having a mess of paint and black lines on it! Hooray!
The most important part is, we have the layout on the board and the images are primed and ready for color. It looks like a hot mess, but thats the best part of it all. It will most likely look like a mess until the finishing touches that bring it all together and clean up all the edges and it will be beautiful. I assure you all, we will make you proud
So, here is a play by play of what we accomplished in the past two days.
1. After sketching out our characters the way we wanted them proportionally and composition wise, we headed over to kinkos to torture the man behind the counter in order to get these bad boys blown up to a size that would be perfect. We had to tweak it here and there, and even use some algebra to work out the proportions! Thank god I am a math wizz!
2. We took these giant drawings, and mirrored them on the computer in order to produce two identical parts. Our concept for the backboard is going to keep everything symmetrical and balanced. We decided to go with this theme, because all in all in the end, you could actually play on this backboard! (we're gluttons for punishment!) Anyway, we cut these out and had our friend hold the backboard vertical while we secured the drawings to the back side of the board in order to be able to trace our designs perfectly onto the glass surface. It was tricky to line them up, we had to stand far away and make sure every corner touched at exactly the same spots, and the lines met evenly, etc. Pain in the butt if you ask me, it took us almost an hour just to line these up properly.
3. The above is a shot of the UWP stencils fastened, and the Ticky stencils were already traced onto the glass, then removed. We replaced them with the stencil of the ribbon and the basketballs up top. We created two separate stencils for the ribbon and the Ticky character so that we could make sure it was all lined up perfectly and to tweak if it we needed to.
4. Tracing the images onto the glass was tricky. We have to hover exactly above where we are drawing, because the glass is almost 3 inches thick! That means, the stencil is 3 inches behind what we are tracing it on, and if you look at it from even a slight angle, it throws off the whole image. Heres a picture of the depth effect it creates when you dont hover directly above it.
5. Once everything was traced and perfect we ripped those stencils off, and we primed our characters. We painted them with a thick white paint so that when we go over them with colors, the colors will stick to the paint better than to the glass, and they will be brighter. Also it will not require as many coats to ensure the spaces are covered perfectly.
And thats where we sit right now. We are going to give the white a good day to dry totally and then we are going to attack this thing with colors. Its going to be slow at first, layering on the base coats of color but once thats done I think this whole thing will come together very quickly. We are quite pleased with the layout and how the process is unfolding. So far no bumps or forks in the road of execution, but we will see what there is to come with this project in the future!
After we relocated the backboard to an easier to work with location for us, we taped off the back of the board and applied the first layer of background paint. We applied to paint to the BACK of the board so that the 1 inch gap between the glass sheets will cause our characters to cast a natural shadow onto the background colors.
This is pretty much where we are at now, lacking some minor lettering detail in the banner, and final black border around the whole thing. Lookin good, if we do say so ourselves.
