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.