From puntastic dad jokes to recognisable 2020 moments, the fun drawings captured in these lunch bag illustrations are making parents and teachers in Melbourne smile again.
Melbourne dad Dave Blumenthal improves his three daughters’ lunches by sketching cartoons with a punchline on their sandwich bags every day.
Blumenthal, whose day job is CFO at a modular building company, started the ritual about nine years ago to make his eldest daughter feel special when the family welcomed her newborn baby sister home and she started primary school at the same time.
“The bags proved to be a big talking point in the classroom and I would regularly receive requests from my daughter’s friends and teachers,” Blumenthal told HuffPost Australia.
“It actually turned out to be a great way to get my daughter to interact more with her teachers too. She has always been a little shy so this gave her a great avenue to start daily conversations with her teachers at lunch time.”
Teachers at the school convinced Blumenthal to start social accounts for the drawings and @sandwichbagdad was born. In a little under four years, the accounts have racked up more than 8,000 followers from all over the world.
He said: “I usually draw the bags at night after work, just as a hobby, and I find it really relaxing to just doodle away and bring the day to a close.”
Enter the hardest year for most of us in living memory. Blumenthal’s comics have made pandemic parenting a little bit easier, especially after enduring Victoria’s gruelling four-month lockdown at their Hawthorn East home.
Blumenthal said he has managed to channel the relatable stresses of COVID-19 into his art which made the lockdown more bearable.
“I normally produce three bags per day so one upside of the whole pandemic was that I did get a bit of break and a chance to recharge my ‘dad joke’ funny bone,” he said.
“I had begun to miss doing that after a while. Over the weeks and months, my kids requested some Disney-themed bags - I did a few weeks’ worth of those - and my wife also challenged me to draw a series of cartoons about the upsides of lockdown.”
Along with strategising hoards of bags for when the children would eventually return to school, the Blumenthals used the lockdown “to create some pretty special family memories,” which included painting a Minion mural and creating parody films starring the family dogs.
“I love knowing that I’m creating a pretty special memory for my kids,” he added referring to the lunch bags.
“While my daughters groan and moan about how ‘cringey’ the bags are, I know they secretly love getting them and being able to show them to their friends and teachers.”
“I can tell because if I ever miss a day, which is pretty rare, there will always be a ‘hey, where’s my drawing today daaaaaaad’… And the collection will be something they will be able to treasure in the future.”