In many cases, when a pinball backglass is old and the paint is flaking off, a new one can be purchased, either a replacement from eBay off another machine or from companies that specialize in creating replacement artworks.
In this case, the Brazil is quite rare and none of that is possible. Looking at the backglass, I decided to attempt to make a new graphic myself, filling in the missing pieces as best as I could.
I started looking for some reference images online, but there are only a couple and all are very low rez (less than 500 pixels wide) so they are pretty useless for this kind of work.
But I wanted to get started, I tried scanning the image on my flatbed scanner. It turns out the thickness of the glass puts it completely out of focus! It would have to be a camera then.
I set up my camera as close to 90 degrees as I could to prevent barrel distortion and took several high-res pics, then stitched them together in Photoshop resulting in a 6000x7000pixel image.
(small version)
Then I started fixing the "easy" stuff, the geometric shapes like circles and squares, the sky, etc.
I am slowly making progress, here is an example:
That area is complete. But down in the complex stuff it is a different story:
on the left is the original scan. On the right is the same area as it looks now, as you can see I have some of it done but the complex shapes like the building and the man walking are still to be done, and in some cases it is gone and I don't know what is supposed to be there. But it will end up being better than it was and I will still have the old one for any purist collectors.
It is a slow process. Things like the letters. In an effort to be authentic, I am scanning each letter individually. In many cases different versions of the same letter exist - a "T" doesn't look exactly the same everywhere, so I am assuming they were hand-drawn. Rather than just use a font I am doing my best to make it as perfect of a reproduction as I can.
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