If I had to make a living with my artwork, I could do better with a cardboard sign and a beard at a boulevard stop somewhere.
When I was only 10-years-old and living with my grandparents and my great uncle, I used to watch him make wonderful pen and ink drawings in his diary. I tried in my own crude way to copy what he was drawing. Rather unsuccessfully, I might add, but I did start copying the cartoons from the funny papers, which was good practice.
Several years later, that all changed when my grandmother gave me a book on cartooning that changed my life forever. “Fun With a Pencil” was written by Andrew Loomis and it described nicely, how to draw cartoons the simple easy way.
When I went in the Navy in 1942, I started making cartoon sketches of what Navy life was all about. Before long, I published a book, “The Navy Goes To College.” I had the local junior college print shop do the work for me and I bought the paper and paid for the binding. It took almost a year to double my money, but it was profitable and I never looked back.
My next creative artwork was on the porch of the Badger Pass ski resort in Yosemite. I started putting my ski cartoons on the bulletin board every day after lunch and about the fourth day someone offered me a dollar for the pencil drawing. It was fun, it was easy and it was profitable. I was skiing all day every day except for the half hour it took to draw the cartoon. When I got shipped back overseas, I converted all of my notes to finished art work and had my first ski cartoon book ready to self publish by the time I got discharged.
That first ski cartoon book led to a part-time career drawing cartoons on the casts of people who had recently broken their legs. If I timed it right, the patient would still be groggy from the ether and not hungry. That way I could get their dinner and maybe $2 for the cast murals. Not too bad for a guy living in the parking lot in an 8-foot-long trailer.
During that winter, I sold out all of my copies of “Are My Skis on Straight?” At the same time, I collected more than enough cartoons for my third ski cartoon book and snagged my first commission to paint walls full of cartoons.
I wanted to paint them in the skier’s dining room, but my idea was taken over by the artist in resident at the lodge in Sun Valley – Max Barsis. As compensation for the idea, the general manager, Pappy Rogers, let me paint carton murals on the employee cafeteria walls. He gave me a season’s pass and free meals as long as I was still painting them. (You can imagine that it took me all winter to paint them, considering I was getting free food.) Those cartoons were only taken down about 10 years ago. A friend who is still in Sun Valley took photos of them all and printed them out for me as a reminder of those fun, but lean years.
This led to a $200 set of murals in Chuck Helm’s ski shop in Ketchum. Not bad when the monthly salary of most people in the Wood River Valley in those days was about $150 a month.
At Squaw Valley in 1949-50, while I was teaching skiing and starting to produce my first feature length ski movie, I also was busy painting casts and creating a pen and ink cartoon every day. I was still selling them for a dollar each and doing pretty well. Every time I sold 11 of them, I could buy another roll of 16mm film for my future movie.
On a night off from showing the current film in Boyne Mountain in 1954, I went to a mountain top restaurant party. It was a new place with newly painted white walls. Before I knew it, it was after 1:30 and I had one wall almost completely full of my ski cartoons. I only had colored Sharpie-type pens to work with so, I figured in the spring they would all get painted over and the lodge could revert to its elegance. They are still there today and covered with plexiglass so that no one can deface them.
The last four books I have published have been full of my cartoons and my book on wine terminology is nothing but cartoons.
Way back in the spring of 1948, I made five serious pen and ink drawings of some famous skiers of that era. I made them with a fine quill pen. About 20 years ago, a man who had a gallery in Vail said, “Why don’t you lithograph them, hand paint them, number them and autograph them to the buyer.” I thought I could sell them for $25 each. He said he would start at $75 each and raise the price as demand dictates. Today, a set of these five hand-painted lithographs surprises me by selling for a lot of money.
To date, I have published 10 books and written three others waiting for publication, and all but one of them has some of my cartoons. Now, I am putting the finishing touches on my autobiography. So far it is 529 pages, not counting cartoons and photographs. I did find the first ski photograph that I ever took. It was in 1940 taken with a 39 cent, Univex plastic camera.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
