(original version 10-29-2013)

Clay Cowgill, October 29th, 2013

It didn't originally occur to me, but as a result of painting the cabinet with the rough, faux-stone like finish it would be extremely hard to apply any sort of adhesive 'sideart' sticker for decoration.  While thinking about that particular corner I'd painted (literally) myself in to, an idea hit me-- side *art* (literally).

Splatterhouse takes place in the 'West Mansion' and one of the game levels features fighting (amongst other things) a ghostly framed painting.  That was too good to pass up, so I decided to add 'sideart' in the form of actual framed 'art'.

My original approach was to have the image be a large, purple eyeball like it is in the game.  After some thought however it occurred to me that you would only see that if you completed at least the second level in the game (and Splatterhouse is hard), so most people probably wouldn't get the joke.  Instead, I fired up Photoshop and created a custom 'painting' in the Splatterhouse style.

In 2012 we created and run our own commercial haunted house and I happened to have a bunch of Goodwill-vintage picture frames leftover from that.  Unfortunately they had all been painted white (by yours truly) for the haunt, so I had to "undo" that.

I used a coat of "flat dark earth" from the airbrush to make a base over the white (shown below) and then did a bunch of dry brushing in lighter shades of brown and tan to restore a 'wood' look.

I had the artwork printed at the local Walgreens Pharmacy on canvas.  (Kinda spendy, but in for a penny, in for a pound.) It mounted easily in the frame and that in turn was ultimately screwed to the side of the cabinet from the inside out.  The online 'print preview' from Walgreens didn't show the image quite how it actually came out (it was supposed to go edge to edge), but the resulting 'matted' look worked OK.