Leia Sketches by John Soukup and Bianca Thompson

I really enjoy adding new art to my collection, especially art featuring my favorite characters from comic books and the Star Wars universe. I recently picked up a couple of pieces featuring Princess Leia from two of my favorite artists, John Soukup (Kettle) and Bianca Thompson.

This piece by Soukup is done on a Priority Mail postage label. Apparently there is a whole movement devoted to making art on postal labels and other stickers and then sticking onto things in public places. Label 228 is a popular item for this as it can be obtained in large quantities for free and the surface can accept all sorts of inks and paints. Apparently there is also an arms race going on to develop stickers that cannot be easily removed from surfaces, allowing artists to more permanently affix their work to public fixtures. My inner delinquent thought it might be fun to stick this Leia sketch somewhere in public, but the collector in me reasoned that if I did that I wouldn't have it in my collection anymore.

I wonder if it is hard for artists to sell their art and ship it off to some other person? I think that if I were an artist I would want people to enjoy my work, but I would want to be able to take it back with me and have control of it. Not a great business model. Even with my less personal possessions I find that if I lend it to someone else to get a better look I really have to fight the urge to snatch it back from them when I feel they've had it for too long or aren't appreciative enough of it. I guess I have a bit of a problem with sharing. Probably every artist has an individual level of comfort when it comes to letting their art go out into the world.

And here is a sketch card done by Bianca Thompson featuring Leia as Jabba the Hutt's slave. Thompson recently posted a link to my post about one of her Wonder Woman sketch cards on her Facebook page. It was kind of cool that she went out of her way to plug my blog. I have conflicting feelings about the slave costume which I discussed at length in a previous post about a sketch card. To rehash, it's an important part of the story and it fits into the timeline, but I think people tend to see it as the SEXY slave costume rather than as the sexy SLAVE costume. Maybe it's just nit-picking and I understand that culturally the costume probably reaches further than the films do, so many people know it more from the cultural references to it than from watching and thinking about the films. Like anything, there are multiple viewpoints and we each view everything through a different filter. This is a cool sketch card done in Thompson's distinctive style, and I am happy to have it in my collection. In going through my blog posts it looks like this post contains my 14th and 15th different sketches of Leia, so I'm building a decent little collection. I need to find a way to display them all together.