I did a couple of re-themes, of EMs, before I did a custom game from scratch. I looked for a trashed playfield of the game I wanted to use, did not want to take a belt sander to a really nice playfield (and currently have a really nice Grand Prix playfield as a result that at some point I'll find a worthy buyer far). By the way, the most important piece of advice I can give you is to go slow and avoid getting frustrated at the pace and decide, oh, I'll just use coarser sand paper -- never a good idea.

In my case I airbrushed the new playfield, but to be honest, that sounds more impressive then it is, it was more of a 'mask and paint' and then I used water slide decals to add some art to inserts and a few other places. I went with painting, since i wanted to keep the EM feel, so the art was done in that style, which my default has limited detail. For my custom machine, I just recently used an overly to add the art. The tricky thing there is you need to have a pretty precise template to be sure things line up correctly.

Here are a couple of photos to give you a feel for what I did.

Here is the trashed playfield

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Sanded down to bare wood . . .

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I use stickers to cover the inserts before a base coat of white, you can also see masking where I wanted to keep the natural wood.

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Part way through painting, you can get a sense of how I did this with masking to only expose the area I wanted to paint.

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And here it is close to being done, and you can see the use of the water slide decals near the inserts.

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Hopefully this helps. Happy to answer any questions you have.

Good luck with your project

Rosh

on this, I just unscrewed everything from the bottom, and removed the staples from the grounding braid. I then slide three pieces of cardboard (unused fedex boxes) one at a time under everything (top, middle, bottom), which given their size I could easily manipulate under the parts, I then slide those three together onto a larger board, then when I was ready I reversed the process and everything was pretty much where it needed to be to be re-attached, including the braid. Worked better than I had expected. Have used this technique three of four times when doing a 'swap', I do use some saw horses with the second/new playfield, with my rotisserie next to it to do the slide.

water slide decals are incredibly thin. They are also very, very fragile when you put them on, ruined more than one, fortunately easy to print them. Well worth re-doing them if they don't go on perfect. I used by clear and white based on the use case.

I used Varathane for the clear coat, and put on a lot of layers and there is no impact from the decals. The inserts are the biggest challenge, once you mask those and start painting, they end up lower then the level of the painted surface (and this assume you have sanded them flag and dealt with any cupping, sinking, etc. So it becomes important that the painted layers are not too thick. I then use varathane for the clear coat, applied with a paint gun (well actually an HVLP spray system from Rockler). Varathane is self leveling, so after the first few layers, I put on some thick layers and that does a nice job of leveling it all and making it nice and smooth. I'm sure others will totally disagree with this approach, but I have been pretty pleased with the results.