ColorAcademy 2005 - Amusements

Amusement Machines - Pinball

Amusement machines and arcades provide an opportunity for great originality of colouring. The pinball table and especially its backflash give a striking chance for the artist-colourist to entice the player into a dreamworld through a dazzling array of colours and winking lights. In fact, it took a whole team of designers to produce the glittering attractions of ‘madam’ pinball. Originally the colours were sprayed on through the fine mesh of a metal (later a polyester) stencil.

Sixteen coloured ‘inks’, as they called them, were applied successively to the back of the glass backflash, which was then sprayed all over with white, giving the colours great luminosity - a greater brilliance than the later four-colour laser print designs.

McKEOWN, H. (1976) Pinball Portfolio. London: New England Library. Describes classic backflashes to pinball tables of games such as Fireball (red and yellow against blue). Another game, Majorette, has warm colouring with orange, yellow and green. Gigi has sexy pink and light fresh colours. Magic City is in purple blues and Space Mission has midnight blue and flashing lights.

TEMPLE, K. (1991) Pinball Art. London: H.C.Blossom. Contains spectacular colour illustrations.

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