If you’ve ever doodled a cartoon on a piece of paper during school, or at an office meeting that drones on endlessly, Dave Hartman is an inspiration.
“My Spanish is terrible,” Hartman confessed in a phone interview, probably because he was kicked out of Spanish class for drawing cartoons. “At any office meeting, I was doodling.”
One of those sketches led to the launch of his Whitefish-based business — Strip’n Flywear — four years ago. His website calls the one-man operation “a quality, fan-driven line of T-shirts and hoodies.” The artwork is often a fishing or outdoor-related theme with an odd twist, such as carp running vacuums or a fish designed to look like a grenade.
The cartoon that ignited Strip’n Flywear depicts a Big Wheel — one of those yellow and red children’s plastic trikes with the large front wheel — towing a drift boat. Called “Big Wheelin’,” the Peter Pan-like tag line appealing to anyone who doesn’t want to grow up is: “Childhood adventure and freedom never has to end!”
The graphic echoes one of Hartman’s main themes: that often fly anglers, and the fly-fishing industry, take the sport way too seriously, that it’s evolving to a golf-like status even though there’s no score keeping. He wants to remind folks that fishing is a “childish pursuit” and “to have fun with it.” The Big Wheel design also ties into his own childhood fantasies.
LINK (via: Billings Gazette)
