Red Sonja Sketch Card by Jason Keith Phillips

Here is another sketch card I picked up recently featuring the other famous barbarian, Red Sonja. Just like my last Red Sonja sketch, I selected a sketch that is a little more cartoon-inspired than the usual fare. The artist who created this one is Jason Keith Phillips, who seems to be a fairly prolific sketch card artist. The card comes from Breygent's 2012 Red Sonja set, which I was packed out in box set form, with each box set a base set, 9 insert cards, one sketch, and one additional hit which could be another sketch, an autograph, or a line art card.

His personal art tends to focus on horror and zombie themes, but he also has touched on most of the major pop culture themes like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Marvel and DC Comic Characters, Adventure Time, and various television shows. Most of his work seems to use similar coloring, with strong red, blue, and a kind of sickly white cast to it. I like a lot of his stuff, although the horror and zombie art turns my stomach a bit. I guess if I have a hard time looking at it, then he's doing his job and making it scary/gory enough.

Anyhow, I like this sketch and I think it's a pretty good addition to my small collection of sketch cards. I especially like all of the blending of the colors and the reflective highlights that make the shield and 'armor' look shiny. In the miniature wargaming hobby using blues, whites, and greys to make painted miniature figure look metallic is called Non-Metallic Metal (NMM). It's a more advanced technique than I ever mastered, but when done right it is very cool.

This Dwarf's weapon, shield, helmet, and fist all show NMM techniques. At first glance it looks like metal, but it's actually all carefully-applied colors to make it look like metal. It's pretty cool, and you can find examples where various colors are used to paint gold or even more extreme things like purple and green metals. It's a cool concept based on looking at an object and trying to imagine where the light and shadows would fall on it if it were really made of metal.

And now you know about that. Sorry to go off on a miniature-painting tangent in the middle of a trading card blog. I've been looking a little bit at my wargaming figures on the shelf and thinking about getting back into painting a little once I get done with school. So that stuff has been on my mind, and the colors on the sketch card got me to thinking about it.