Hapless wanderer

Kids these days, with their Nike™® this and iPhone©®™ that! Brands rule, all else drools. If it ain't shiny and new, it just ain't.

Once upon a time we Boy Scout leaders decided to out-Shinola™® those shiny baubles with some guerrilla marketing of our own.

Thus was hatched the Hurner-Turner Burner™©-brand Backpacking Trip.

Hurner is Greg Hurner, just now stepping down as Scoutmaster for our sons' Troop. Greg grew up cattle ranching and hunting, born outdoors, built Ford™® tough and all that. He's got hooves for feet and can climb slopes at a sprint. With an impish grin (some may say slightly wicked), he frequently challenges Scouts to the limits of their physical ability, encouraging activities that are safe but just beyond their comfort level. He's good for the Scouts. That's him above, stick-figured high atop a peak.

Turner is me, Scoutmaster at the time, born old and indoors, the Air Force brat who didn't take up backpacking until my son joined Scouting. I love the outdoors as much as the next person, but count every trip a success when I and the Scouts return unscathed. 

I was the Troop's Nervous Nellie, bearer of paperwork, making sure that the Troop filed all the necessary permits, that drivers were secured, and enough trained adults were on hand to help. I was always the sweep, the last guy in line on a trek, making sure no one was left behind and prodding Scouts even slower than me to pick up the pace. I was good for the Troop welfare, I think. That's me in the way back of the illustration, sweeping.

We adults were fighting a growing epidemic in the Troop, a slouching toward languor. When Scouts joined outings at all, they preferred car camping: Ride in a car to a campsite, unfold lawn chair, open Spaghettios®© and Gatorade©™, argue with other Scouts about who does dishes, collapse late in a sleeping bag leaving the dishes a mess, breakfast on Pop-Tarts™®, gather the dirty dishes in a blanket, throw it in the car, argue about who will take it home to wash, drive to In-N-Out™© for burgers Animal Style®™, go home.

Car camping has its rare place in the Troop, but it falls under the category of Things Scouts Can Do Just As Easily With Their Own Families. Boy Scouts can be unique among kids' groups if we let it, and backpacking is one of its classic distinctions.

(Yes, yes, Boy Scouts is supposed to be boy run, but without a good nudge/push, it would be Spaghettios®™ and Gatorade™® and grousing over dishes ad infinitum.) 

Nudging the Troop toward a backpacking trip, we decided to make it an event, complete with its own T-shirt, the way we traditionally did for summer camp.

I designed it with felt pen which I scanned into Photoshop®™ and enhanced with an Illustrator®© flame and letterform shapes. A lifetime absorption of little R. Crumb and Big Daddy Roth, some Sempé and R.O. Blechman and George Herriman and Sunday comics, leaked out into the finished piece.

In an important way, the Hurner-Turner Burner®© was a hit, attracting most of our Scouts, and even a couple of full patrols, which was rare. Desolation Wilderness, a funny name for such a beautiful place above Lake Tahoe to the west, provided something for everyone, a "wasteland" of granite face for play and solitude. Heavily protected, Desolation Wilderness requires permits and restricts visitors' first night's stay in certain zones of the wilderness. It required our Troop to split into patrols and operate on their own about a third of a mile from one another for the first night. Everyone ate out of his own mess kit, so arguments over dish washing fell by the way.

While new Scouts stayed near a lake and took it easy trying out their first backpacking experience, older Scouts spent a night of the long weekend hiking in the slopes of another zone and roughing it among themselves near a distant peak.

In another important way, the Hurner-Turner Burner™© was a big failure.

Let's just say it involved an abundance of confidence, a good measure of hope and a scarcity of preparation; a hopeful contingency plan, a mis-read topographical map, a missed trail spur, a long vigil for Messrs. Hurner and Turner in a remote parking lot; and a California Highway Patrol helicopter.

Everyone was safe, no one got hurt, except for feelings and egos. Recriminations surfaced, the thin veneer of civility wore through in places, and my fire-bright outlook on Scouting dimmed a bit.

A snow camping trip, tentatively called the Hurner-Turner Ice Burner™© or the Hurner-Turner Snow Churner®©, never materialized. Previous trips had cured older Scouts of any desire to camp in snow ever again.

In praise of Prismacolor®™©

Our son's looking at cars … I put this monster in one of his top choices …

For bouts of drawer's block, I recommend inventing monsters.

Who knows what monsters lurk in your heart, after all? Only you. Release them. They want out, to live and move and have their being where and when your pencil goes. So let your pencil go; follow it around until the first line meets the last. Monsters form, drawer's block disperses.

This monster came to in such a way. With two projects looming last week and doubt about where to start, I took black Prismacolor©™® (Item PC935) pencil to sketchpad, circling around the inflamed eyeball until this dude tattooed the page.

In one swell foop, I inflamed two long-lost loves, one going all the way back to childhood.

The other is Prismacolor©™pencil, which I'd abandoned years ago. But looking over old stuff — stuff predating the necessary evil of digital illustration — reminded me how much I love it. It's just my speed, not slippery like pen, not thin and wanting like graphite pencil.

Prismacolor®© black skates over the paper in full rich black black lines, which take repeated goings over to thicken and feather outlines, but can also whisper over the paper for texture, letting the unseen nooks of the paper show.

The "lead" is soft enough to flow, but hard enough to keep its point a while, and doesn't break within the wooden shaft like other pencils do. Too many times I've sharpened lesser pencils down to the nub in futile exercise, as the lead falls out with each sharpening.

I like to photocopy Prismacolor™® drawings onto thicker bristol board and paint them with watercolor. The toner resists water, so the color falls around the black line, letting it stay true and bold over the color.

Thus this monster was colored.

Black ("Noir") Prismacolor®™ pencils come dear, though; I had forgotten. They are the only pencils missing from the Prismacolor©® display in art stores. I might have to score a black-market supplier.

In this sketch I married my beloved pencils to my beloved monsters.

How I craved those bug-eyed, lamprey-toothed monsters that drove hot rods so hard their very chassis warped in the frozen motion! I always stopped what I was doing as a kid to stare at the stickers and cards and magazines where they lived. The beasts of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's airbrush come foremost to mind, but he was not the only one. In fact, the research this sketch impelled tells me it was Bill Campbell's "Weird-Ohs" who stole my child heart.

The bulbous wild bloodshot eyes, the rambling wayward tongue! The stuff of waking dreams. A childhood friend from long ago, Emile Duronslet Jr., showed me how to draw Martians that sort of looked liked this (left). I'm thinking Emile too had fallen under Bill Campbell's spell.

Campbell had one of those careers to die for, a career made dead by the 21st Century: He painted the cover art for the boxes of plastic models of cars and planes, depicting the real things in four-color action. From that he unveiled his monstrous "Weird-Ohs" and "Silly Surfer" creatures. That's what Emile always called them — creatures — as he made up stories about them.

Drawn by the art and caught up in the zeitgeist, I began making those models; every boy was. It was the logical next step.

Just not the right step for me. I was a butcher.

The patience required, the fine motor skills! Good god! The emotional plummet of realizing, upon successful completion of Step 9c, I missed a fold on the instructions and skipped over the crucial and linear steps 3 through 9b, with their sanding and priming and painting.

And mom incessantly and feverishly warning me not to sniff the glue. "There's a reason it's called dope!!" I was convinced even the smell of glue would melt my brain out my nostrils.

Elbows locked, fingers failing, patience shredded, I was doomed to leave a miniature glue-ruined pick-and-pull lot in my bedroom for years to come.

The model manufacturers took pity on me and created Snap Tite™© kits, no glue required, simple steps, water-based adhesive stickers the only trick. It was like having a toy car with some assembly required, except once assembled nothing worked except for the ample swooping surfaces, which were good for collecting dust.

They matched my inchoate skill set, though. I could put the parts together and stare at the 3-D realizations of the cars "Big Daddy" and Bill Campbell and others drew. An industrial designer named Tom Daniel, I learn, created the concepts for many of those models that saved my dignity.

Sometimes I muse about testing my model making skills as an old child; so far, no move made. But I still love to draw them to my heart's content. I've even riffed on this genre for pay. I'll make more and post here.

Draw yourself a monster.

Getting to the roots

This cover that I got to do for an album by The Slackers reminded of the quadruple-whammy of events that threw me headlong into a life of drawing:

1. Dinosaurs roamed the earth! Brian LaMay and I always argued at first grade recess over who would be Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus (neither of us wanted to be the plant eater, and it turns out now it didn't even exist, so why should we have bothered?) Ironically, I hardly ever drew dinosaurs, but the artwork in my books fascinated me nightly. Way back then, illustrators were the only ones who could make these beasts come alive. So what if the artists drew them chest deep in swamps or with their tails dragging, which scientists now say didn't happen.

2. Crayola. I can't find it now, but Crayola once ran a TV commercial in which illustrators (their disembodied hands, anyway) made realistic tigers and zebras and fish with the same crayons that mocked me from their green and yellow box. I was spellbound.

3. Emile Duronslet Jr., a teenager who lived in my neighborhood and drew magically. Until I met him, I didn't realize that humans made the pictures in all those books I loved. Even as a kid he was passionate about drawing and teaching others. He would tell stories about his goggle-eyed Martians, complete with Martian dialogue, as he populated notebook paper with them. I think he became an animator in the gaming industry.

4. Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and/or Stanley "Mouse" Miller (you pick who came first or takes credit), purveyor of hot rod monster art. I still love their oversized demons — bulbous eyes, fencerows of crooked teeth, slobber roping out of their giant leering smiles — jammed into impossibly souped-up hot rods. One gigantic monster arm was almost always raised high above a gigantic gear shifter, the bony hair-flecked fingers ready to put the monster car in motion. Making Revell models of hot rods frustrated me, and my mom had sufficiently freaked me out about paving my own ruin if I whiffed so much as a molecule of model glue, but I dearly loved the artwork.

So when the art director for The Slackers' project told me the cover would have to feature a slot machine — a one-armed bandit! — I wasted no time in talking the art director into letting me rip off (I mean, pay homage to) "Big Daddy" and "Mouse."

I thought I'd lost that chance for good. Years before, drawing for Brew Your Own Magazine, I did key art for a story about how home brewers can use their senses to avoid mistakes in their ale batches. Perfect for bulging eyes, a big nose and a slurping, snaky tongue. Along with a half-dozen sketch ideas, I included this one and really pushed it:

The note below the sketch wasn't enough, though. I had to call and make my plea. No luck.

"Yeah," said the art director.
"None of us knows who this 'Big Daddy' guy is."

Kids today.