Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Lunchbags and Lunchboxes or How To Be A Preschool Rockstar

Sometimes Dexter's lunchbox does not make it home from school, but gets left behind on the shelf or in Daddy's car. When this happens, Mom rolls old school, packing his lunch in a paper sack. As laid back as his preschool is, I have never seen any kid's lunch in a bag, so I do like to step it up with illustrating the bag. Dexter always requests I draw all of our faces on one side, with our neighbors who live next door on the other side of the bag.

our family

the next door neighbors
 At the beginning of the summer he started requesting the faces get decorated as well, the two themes being the members of KISS and various Star Wars characters. Requested by character name, and assigned to each person specifically.

Darth Vader, Young Obi Wan, Yoda, and R2D2

Gene Simmons, Ace Freely, and Peter Kriss
 As summer progressed, he decided it was time for a new lunchbox. His old one was getting really beat up and worn, and was looking very babyish. We started looking together right after July 4th. He wanted Lego Star Wars, but the only ones were Clone Wars. He wanted Mario Bros, but we didn't see that. Then he realized what he really wanted was a Lego Star Wars/Pokemon/KISS/Spiderman/Green Lantern/Super Mario/Captain America lunch box.

This was a tall order, but I thought it could be made. I found a bunch of images on the internet and enlisted our neighbor Ben Lewis (seen above in lunchbag cartoon form) to use his Propmaster Photoshop skills and hook up with a vinyl label guy to make some new lunchbox art. I bought the most basic lunchbox I could find, peeled off whatever stickers were on it, removed the rest of the adhesive with Goo Be Gone, and passed the blank to Ben.

Behold, the most amazing lunchbox you have ever seen, and the dream of every four year old boy.



When Dexter walks into school, a swarm of little boys crowd around to gaze upon it. They hold up various action figures in their grubby hands to find its picture on it. So far, the lunchbox has made it home just about every night.

2 comments:

  1. This is the most fantastic thing I have ever seen. Whatever shortcomings you may have as a mother in the future (not saying you'll have any, but you know...) will be cancelled out by the awseomeness of this lunchbox.

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  2. while I am a fan of the bags because I do love seeing our cat drawn as various KISS and Starwars characters, the lunch box does rock!!

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