It was a beautiful fall evening, sitting around a fire pit, enjoying a campout. In fact, the only thing missing from the evening was an actual fire. There was wood, there was tinder, there were matches. But, there was no fire. Instead, there were two boy scouts frantically lighting matches trying to get the campfire started. Years of training were completely ignored in favor of ever popular but never effective technique of throwing as many lit matches as possible onto the wood hoping that it will magically catch fire.

It didn’t. Undaunted, the boys each declared that they would be the first to get the fire going! More matches were lit and any flammable material they could get their hands on was added to the mix. The burnt matches piled up. and the competition became more and more intense.

The objective of this piece was to represent a timeline of an event on packaging of some kind. I needed to visually show time passing, but wished to tell a story while I was doing it. The image of this competition between boy scouts came to mind. So did the pile of burnt matches. I decided to use that imagery to show just how the fire starting competition played out.

It was so frustrating, watching these two attempt to do something as simple as start a fire. I started wondering what sort of product could be used to show the burnt matches timeline. I decided upon the most useless contraption for starting a fire that I’ve ever come across: the bow drill. People always say that anciently, man made fire from rubbing sticks together. But, I’ve never actually seen anyone ever be able to do that. Ever. So, why not represent a couple of scouts unable to make a fire with the most ineffective fire making contraption I know.