sandy koufax painting

A week or so ago I posted about how much I liked the Sandy Koufax card I received in a trade with Night Owl. I also mentioned how I wanted to get back into drawing and painting. I originally wanted to do something like this Mickey Mantle card I saw online.

The more I looked at the card I knew that it might not make a good candidate for a painting or sketch.

Originally I wanted to paint the whole card and just leave out some things that I didn't want to keep, like maybe the catcher or the big aisles in the stadium. I thought about making them a little bit more narrow.

I was thinking to do something like this:

But for some reason it never came out that good in my mind. Also I noticed when looking closely at the card I couldn't really see a lot of detail in his face. I have a feeling that is going to be a problem if I only use cards as my basis for paintings. They're just too small sometimes to get really good idea of the face.

I'm probably going to have to get a model to pose in baseball type poses or look to photos and really watch some games more closely to see if I can just use that as a basis and then add in the details to make it more resemble the person I'm trying to paint.

That may be too much for this amateur artist though. I thought I'd start simple and use a card that I really liked which also happens to be a painting.



I took this card and cropped it to be around the same size as the canvas that I was going use.


Well, anyway here is my first sketch using the Koufax card as a guide.


I did this in colored pencil and it took me a couple of tries to get it where I was somewhat happy with it.


You can see from the photo above that all I've really done is make the outlines of his body more defined.


Here he is with a full background which makes the figure standout. Now I'm starting to see what I like and don't like. I think both of his arms aren't in the right place.


I tried moving his gloved hand out a little. I think it looks awkward the way it was.
Now I'm sure that the pitching arm is messed up too,but this is all I've gotten done so far. I spent about 2 hours maybe getting it to this point. I spent most of that time washing and trying to find all my old brushes. I also spent a lot of time looking at the current version trying to see where I've gone wrong.

I think that the pitching arm needs to come in more. My painting is different than the card in that in mine it looks like we are looking at him from a slightly different perspective. The card is more from just his side. In mine it looks like maybe we are a little bit more in front of him. I need to bring in the ball and the forearm a bit.

Creative criticism is always welcome.