Whatever your interests or obsessions are, you can probably trace them back to just a few unpredictable, incidental experiences in your early life that made you react in a surprising & unforgettable way. You don’t get to choose. For me, I think it was a lot of books & media, but it was also the Kwazy Quilt.

My grandparents across the country had one of these, I must have handled it only a handful of times when I was less than 10 years old, and I don’t remember it being mindblowing at the time — but I do remember it, The revelation struck me out of the blue earlier this year and within a couple hours I had purchased one of my own on eBay.

Something about this puzzle and its packaging spoke directly to me. The shiny plastic, the color palette, the curved geometry, the little raised lip running around the edge of each shape. The crisp, thick typography, and the little colored stripe on the Gabriel logo. 1977 printed as “MCMLXXVII” in Roman numerals. Many seeds were planted in the garden of the mind… and some of them only bloomed many years later.

It’s easy [for me] to dismiss the kind of work I like to do as fairly light. Superficial. It takes sustained, superhuman effort to produce a silly little rectangle of colors and shapes, and then it makes people’s eyes feel good for a minute and then they look away. Who cares? But memories like this remind me that during the Process, there are bigger, hungrier thoughts swimming out of sight below the surface, gently rocking the boat. The seeds in the garden are spiraling upwards toward the sun

We are charging directly into the sun today and attempting a little web development on the old Macbook Pro. Stay tuned.

— A∙

This is a pretty straight-up pen tool trace job, but I’m outta time to take it any further.

I’m not really into tarot but I am really into Sayonara Wild Hearts. There’s a whole tarot motif going on there, and of course you can buy the cards from Annapurna’s merch store, so I got the deck and cut & sanded a couple pieces of plexiglas to make a little display for my car. It sits on my phone mount directly behind the phone itself, and I rotate the cards every week or two. Now I have a wallpaper-ready card template I can use to matchy-match them together.

Check out Sayonara Wild Hearts. Rhythm games aren’t usually my thing but this one is a cut above most rhythm games or most games period. It’s a masterpiece of musical and visual fusion, so don’t try to play it on a tiny phone screen with your fat ham hands in the way — fire up the big TV and put on headphones, maybe.

One day I will achieve ~gold rank~ on every stage, but for now there is work to be done.

—A∙

No antiques today, just ghosts — Ansel.tv is way overdue to go live but I cannot launch in good conscience with these sloppy grafix representing my Personal Brand. See here: I did the bottom version of this graphic 2018 in good old Adobe Flash, and I must have thought it looked pretty dang good. I opened it up today in 2023 and yelped like a kicked dog. Nothing to do but leap right into Affinity Designer and rebury the dead.

This is also illustrative of just how underpowered and weird the vector tools have always been in Flash. I learned how to do a lot of things the wrong way and had to unlearn it all when I started messing around with big boy’s toys. That buttery black outline on the 2023 image is a built-in layer effect in Designer — five seconds to pick a color & thickness and forget about it. If I was 500% sure I was really done with it and wouldn’t want to move things around, I could achieve a more permanent result by unifying the different letterforms into a single curve and putting a single stroke on the whole thing. Doing this same effect in Flash (which doesn’t even follow the stroke/fill paradigm of Illustrator or Designer) required a tiresome workaround with multiple steps/layers and the end result wasn’t “live,” so any changes to the pink fills would mean doing the workaround process again or manually tweaking the black outline to match.

You can get so used to dancing around like this that you start to feel pretty clever, when in fact you are playing with a broken Swiss Army knife in the firing range parking lot, hearing the muffled pops and booms from inside and really not grasping the desperation of your position.

cat & battlestation for your enjoyment:

That’s all for now.

—A∙

I promised to post and so I will. Had to quit while I was ahead on this one cause we’re short on time and the CFO has to make a bank run this morning, but I squeezed the juice out of this hand-painted lettering I pulled off a piano. These letters have what you might call character. The little serrations all over, the flat-topped ampersand, the diamond loop on the M — there’s a lot of excitement going on here.

Check out this goofy Egyptian motif with the winged sun up top. Mathushek was a German doing cutting-edge piano innovation in New York City, but in the early 20th century you could sell anything by putting a little pharaoh on it, and if THAT is not the American dream well folks I don’t know what is

caturday battlestation pic for your consideration:

let’s get that bag and get in that sarcophagus yall. that’s all for now.

—A∙

Good morning, Newgrounds! If you haven’t already, go check out my latest Art submission, Quarry Facility (also featured in my new userpage banner) and VOTE 5!!! I’ve gotten into a fun routine in the last week that I’d like to share with you today. 

I stole this bit from Aaron Draplin, a huge (& hugely talented) guy who I admire. Draplin’s work is rooted in the industrial & commercial design traditions of yesteryear, the kind of “trade art” you don’t see as much anymore. Check out his Instagram for tons of cool old signs, labels, packages, etc., and his own “rebuilt” vector versions of the very finest selections. Here’s the game: See something you like? Copy it & rebuild it yourself, curve for curve. 

If you’re not familiar with vectoring around, it is not at all like drawing or tracing on paper. It requires you to contort your brain in entirely new ways, like tying invisible knots. Doing things elegantly will string those knots into an intricate web, rewarding you with sophisticated geometries which you can flex to save huge amounts of time, effort and repetition. Today I’m just getting started messing with the variable stroke width graph to reach for that tapered, brush-painted look, and I could probably spend all day getting it just a little more perfect here & there, but I’m out of time. That’s part of the beauty of these little rebuild jobs — there’s no surprises, I can wrap my head around it from beginning to end, and after a couple hours I can put down the [P]encil and walk away with no heartbreak or headache, just a thing to Post.

I’ll be posting these on NG mostly-daily from now on (and on my Tumblr and Instagram) but here are the 5 I already pulled:

If you want to practice your vector skills or are just looking for a thing to do and post, try this out.

Here’s the trivia: today’s Walgreen Agency type comes off a couple of coffee mugs, part of the same historic collection of mugs that inspired the breakfast spread in Scope Shop just about a year ago. I wish I’d taken a photo of those ones, with the orange/brown stripe around the rim, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. The importance of mugs and the coffee that goes in them cannot be overstated.

…and finally, here’s the battlestation shot of the day, feat. Trixie the cat early in the morning.

That’s all for now.

—A∙

Good morning to all the new followers, and a huge thanks to Tankman Triweekly for featuring me in yesterday’s issue! Crazy to see myself seated in history next to the RWD after all these years lol

I could spend all day mashing keyboard about nostalgia bomb manly tears etc. (and I do want to check out the other features) but for now I’m on vacation with limited internet so it’s time for work — I’m up north at the lake for the holiday weekend, the vibes are immaculate, and by jingo we are pounding those pixels at dawn

more art real soon. i’m bout to do it like jeff mangum just you watch me

Hey, everyone. First off, you better check out my newest Art Portal upload: Castle Crypt! I’ve been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom and now everyone knows it

Next, here’s an update on me. I could write a lot about each of these bullet points alone, and maybe I will later, but here are the broad strokes:

• I dropped out of college a decade ago and have supported myself with a variety of wagie jobs. Now I’m enjoying the freedom & terror of self-employment and may actually survive the launch.
• I’ve got my own apartment, car, and cat here in beautiful Minnesota. (aesthetic battlestation pictured above)
• Flash is dead and it’s a shame. No plans to do any animating or programming again any time soon. I’m working with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, drawing in Procreate and vectoring in Affinity Designer.
• I have completed pieces and more work in progress that I’ll be posting on Newgrounds soon. The website is returning soon as well, and a store if there’s interest in prints etc.
• I’m accepting commissions (and donations, of course) - more details to come in a separate post (and on Collabinator), but comment, DM me or hit my line if you’d like to talk shop, catch up or just say hello.

As Ronald Reagan said:

“For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon.”

Here’s what I look like today. I’m almost 30.

Thanks for voting 5,

Ansel

up & at em folks

only the finest

i may be unemployed but by god we are getting some real work done with all this free time