Adventures of the Past: Ketchup Man

Back when I was in elementary school, I remember during lunch that me and a friend would play with our food. More specifically, we'd play with our ketchup packets because it had this image of this ketchup packet wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket. We dubbed him as the "Ketchup Man." It was really hilarious to mess around with and for some reason, after many many many many year later, I still remember the Ketchup Man.

One night, I started Googling up pictures of old school lunches at school and during that, I remembered the Ketchup Man and tried Googling that cartoon up. Unsurprisingly, his "official" name wasn't actually Ketchup Man so I had to do some digging around for an image of this guy.
To my luck, I found a pretty great hi-res photo of that very ketchup packet!

Apparently, he goes by the name (or title) of "Leader of the Packets."
Here's the source for the photo above if anyone is wondering.

Needless to say, I was pretty happy about finally seeing this guy again after all these years! That excitement didn't last long when I found out really quickly that there's no image of the artwork itself out in the wild internet, so I tasked myself with the fun project of recreating (tracing over) the image in Adobe Illustrator so I can have a clear, high resolution vector drawing of this character.
And it's done! It was a fun side project!

I posted this on my Twitter and Instagram pages, tagging the Heinz Ketchup pages in hopes of a reply to see if they remember their own outdated mascot, but they haven't said anything as of now.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with reviving this old character with a fresh, clean vector artwork!