Junk Drawer: Tintin Stencil For Cartoon Vandalism

Click all for lots bigger so that you can play along at home.

For a while in the late 1980s, my friends and I liked to go out at night and stencil the local dumpsters and power transformer boxes in Pacific Beach and Mission Beach, San Diego, with random, often esoteric cartoon characters and meaningless Dada phrases ("Fight Rot!"). We didn't do it all that often, and we were careful not to overdo it. I guess every city has one or two phantom stencilers. It was exciting and thrilling! Tintin was, for me, a natural choice, as I've been obsessed with Tintin comics most of my life, and his minimalistic character design lent itself naturally to the stencil medium.

The outline above served well enough on its own, but just to go the extra mile on this one, I cut separations for the face and the hair, so first you could spray this one in flesh-tone:

And then this one in orange:

Top it off with the outline in black, et voilà! A perfect, color Tintin!

Of course, when you're trying to evade police cars and angry citizens, you don't always have time to execute carefully color-separated vandalism, but whatever.

I wonder if any of our stencils are still "alive" in San Diego? If you live there and there's still a donut shop on Ingraham just north of Grand Avenue, check the back door to see if Wilma Flintstone (whom they carefully painted around at least once) is still there.