Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Sketch cards

Lately I've been consumed with making little sketch cards. When I first came across sketch cards I thought they were a little weird. I guess the first ones I really saw in person were the sketch cards from last years Allen and Ginter. I wasn't that high on them at the time, but recently I had the chance to finish off that set and it made me look at them differently.

So anyway, here are some random sketch cards that I've done.

Originally I had the bright idea to do them on large paper and then shrink them down to card size.

I then, had the bright idea to trace them onto thicker paper stock so it was more like a trading card. Only one of these made it to the final stage:


This is a Valkyrie, a character from Airboy. A comic that originally ran in the 1940's and made a brief comeback in the mid 80's.

I realized that doing all that scanning and cropping and tracing weren't really necessary. Just making it from scratch on a 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 card is the best way to go. Their may not be a lot of detail, but it's a true sketch card. My cards are a little rough for now, but I'll correct them later.

This is one of my favorites:


Captain America was the first comic I remember owning and he's always been my favorite comic book character.

This is one of my least favorites. I knocked this one out quickly in pencil just to see what a black and white pencil sketch would look like.




Unfortunately it doesn't look anything like Julie Newmar or Catwoman or Julie Newmar as Catwoman. It just looks sort of like a girl in a Halloween costume.

I actually started out trying to do sports related cards first, but none of them came out the way I wanted. This one of the Mick was the first one that I liked.




A little too monotone, but I was working with a black and white photograph so I didn't have much color information to go on. I should have come up with something a little more colorful though.

This one was also taken from a black and white background. I didn't get much more creative with this background either.

Still doesn't quite look like who it's supposed to look like, but I can still practice up and get better.


I left this one uncut so that everybody could see the unfinished borders and "palette" on the left side. I needed to try out the different colors before I committed to using them in the sketch. If you look closely you can see the pencil borders.

I'm not sure why I went to so much trouble picking colors, the background on this card is the worst out of all of them. I don't like the color selection much and I don't like the "craziness" of the scribbles. I should've come up with something a little better for this one. I think psychedelic baseball trails would be cool to add in but I think it might be too late now.

I kind of like my little homemade cards. Nothing much to write home about, but for just playing around these past few days I think they look kind of cool.

Thanks for reading.

5 comments:

Play at the Plate said...

That's some talent right there! Nice.

I'm a poster girl with no poster said...

you're good at it. keep it up!

Fuji said...

These are awesome!

Jeremy said...

Thanks Brian, Heidi and Fuji. I'm glad you all liked them.

Suldog said...

For what it's worth, I recognized Julie Newmar immediately, before I read the text!