I have a new project in the works. No, it's not another podcast and no, my wife and I aren't planning for a second child (at least not yet.) I'm going to custom paint a Super Nintendo! 

Rob (Warbuff) and I are friends. We talk to each other quite a bit outside of GIO. Rob's a trash talker and I sometimes want to shoot him in the face with Nerf darts, but I still like the guy. He recently left a comment on my Borderlands 2 blog and said, "BARF!" to me playing it for 158 hours because he's an idiot and wouldn't know a good game if it was delivered to his front door in a pot of gold by a leprechaun riding a rainbow colored velociraptor. How he ever got a career testing video games is beyond me... I like good games like Borderlands 2, so I'm clearly more qualified!

Slap Rob for hatin' on Borderlands 2!

This past week, Rob told me he bought a jaundiced (yellowed) Super Nintendo at a local store and he wanted to custom paint it. He asked me if I had any design ideas. I knew that like me, he was a big fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I almost immediately had an idea and the next day, I made a mock-up in Photoshop and sent it to him. He liked it. I liked it too, and the more I looked at it, the more I wanted to paint my own Super Nintendo. However, I just couldn't do that to my own SNES, especially considering mine doesn't have a disease. I started looking online to see how cool custom console paint jobs could be. I discovered a few custom SNES consoles that had a smooth, high gloss finish (like the picture at the top of this post) and once I saw that, I was sold on doing this project. That night, I did some digging on eBay and looked for the cheapest Super Nintendo I could find that was in good working condition and not cracked. I quickly found one and won the bid at $22.50! Not bad considering my local used games store is selling them for $50.00. 

Here's my original mock-up. Each stripe represents the headbands of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I liked my mock-up, but it wasn't finished yet. I still hadn't picked a color for the Power and Reset switches. Nothing I picked was working for me. I went and talked to my wife about it to see what she thought. I asked her what she thought of white and she said initially thought black would be better. I told her that I had tried brown, but maybe I'd like black more, but then she said, "Well... I guess their eyes are white, so that might work." And that's when it hit me. "Oh, their eyes are white! I could make the switches be the eyes and paint a color band around that! Once I was working on my new mock-up, I suddenly realized that the console actually kinda looks like an upside down, squared Ninja Turtle head - the switches are the eyes and the cartridge slot is the mouth. 

I'm much more nostalgic for the '80s cartoon logo, but I prefer the simplicity of the comics logo for my design. 

I'm really excited to work on this project. I was also really nervous about doing this because I have no idea what I'm doing, but I found out a few days ago that I know someone who's a professional painter. His name is Matt and he paints cars. He's custom painted quite a few things, including guitars and video game consoles. He offered to help me with my project! I'm confident that this is going to turn out exactly the way I want it because Matt knows exactly what to do. I can't wait to get started! I'll post another blog once we're finished to show some before and after pictures (and hopefully some in between pics of the process as well.)