Blowout Sketch Card Draft: Ted Dastick Jr. Viceroy Space! AP Sketch

A couple of months ago a novel thread popped up on the Blowout Cards forums. Several fairly prominent sketch card artists are forum members, and someone proposed that the forum hold a sketch card draft. Thirteen artists all agreed to do 2-4 sketches each, with some being Personal Sketch Cards and some being Artist Proofs / Artist Samples from trading card sets.

The draft participants each paid for a slot, and the artists were paid as their cards were completed, with a deadline of the end of April to complete the sketches. The list of participants was randomized to generate the pick order, and then all of the sketch cards were revealed at once:

Not every sketch was something that would fit in my collection, but they were all pretty well done. Chris Henderson and Brian DeGuire did some pretty cool multi-layered sketches, and Tim Proctor did a booklet sketch / autograph of himself as one of the Zombies from The Walking Dead (he actually appears as a zombie on the show). I got pick #28 out of 43, so I was a little nervous about what would be left by the time my turn came around. It took about 3 days to get to my pick and a few of my top choices were already taken, but there were still some stuff from my Top Ten list on the board. After a little deliberation I chose Ted Dastick Jr.'s Artist Proof from Viceroy's SPACE! set. It features a nice brightly-colored galactic scene, which appears to be based on a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Horsehead Nebula.

This is probably not something I would have sought out for my collection on my own, but it is a pretty cool piece to have. I guess that is the beauty of the sketch draft format; the artists were given very few rules as far as what to put on the cards, so depending on your draft slot you could really wind up with anything. 

Each artist shipped the cards out directly, and my package from Ted Dastick Jr. included a few extras.

One was this Garbage Pail Kids-inspired sticker proclaiming me as the recipient of an Awesome Collector Award.

Another inclusion was this Star Wars-themed card featuring the artist as Han Solo.

Finally, he included a business card so that parties interested in his art might be able to find him on the web. The sketch card draft was a cool idea and went relatively smoothly considering the drama that can sometimes happen on forums. A lot of people were pretty skeptical that it could be pulled off, but all of the artists made the deadline, all the participants paid for their slots, and as far as I know everyone received their cards without any trouble. Depending on timing it is probably something I would do again.