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∙