My Dad microwaves his red wine.

He says it’s brings out the flavour.

Now I’m no wine aficionado, but I’m fairly sure the sight of my old man blasting a goblet of claret in the micro for 15 seconds would turn a sommelier a funny shade of olive.

I suspect the micro-mulling of red wine isn’t widely practiced as it nukes the delicate nuances and characteristics of the wine, the very things the hard working vineyard owner worked so hard to put in the bottle in the first place. 

In many ways, this is how I feel about Autotrace, the process of vectorising a hand drawing. The drawing is fed through a computer program which converts all of the hand drawn lines and marks into a series of points, which are then joined by straight lines. Think of it as a massive dot to dot.

During this re-formatting, many of the little intricies that make a drawing unique and full of character; the wobbly hand drawn line, the smudgy bits, the little quivers of nib to paper, are erased. Stripped away, deleted, lost forever.

The result? A steralised version of the original (if you ask me).

So why do it?

(Autotrace, not microwaving).

Well in fairness, some manufacturing methods do require vector based artwork. There’s no getting round that one. Yet. Scale can be easier to play with, curves can be perfected, special effects can be layered on.

It does have its uses, just not in my studio.

If you commission a hand drawn illustration, a hand drawn illustration you shall get. I like my drawings to remain in their original state (and my red wine at room temperature).

Embrace the imperfections. Reveal in the delight of a fingerprint and champion the odd smudge, in my opinion, they are the best bits!

So that’s why I don’t supply my artwork in vector format, and why I don’t drink red wine at my parents’ house.

Jx