Some Holiday Sketches by Kate Carleton

One of the artists I follow on social media, Kate Carleton, offered up discounted sketches in her webstore during the holidays. I already had a couple of her licensed sketch cards in my collection, but I wanted some art from her for my two main sketch collections, Princess Leia and Power Girl.

She made these while streaming on Facebook Live and I happened to be logged in at the time, so I got to watch the process. They were originally supposed to be smaller sketches, but she said she ran out of the smaller stock and wound up upgrading them to 5" x 7" illustration board, which is a bonus because artists usually scale up prices based on the size of the work. Watching the art being made is pretty cool, and it gives you an idea about the amount of work it takes to get these things done. Each of these sketches took 40-50 minutes from start to finish.

When I watched the video, my own personal hangups led me to misinterpret a couple of things that Kate said, and I wrote about it here. She contacted me with some clarification and I hope that I haven't soured her on selling art to me, as I am a big fan of her work. I put my foot in my mouth from time to time, and I feel bad about passing judgments on someone I don't know well based on a few minutes of video. Artists are people, too, and I am sorry that I jumped to conclusions. I am quite happy with the finished sketches, and I am glad to have Carleton art for both of my primary sketch card collections. I feel weird deleting my grouchy rant completely, but I did make it harder to read and I would encourage you not to read it. I hope that Kate Carleton will accept my apologies for writing it.

If the video has sound, you also learn what the artists think of your requests. It sounded like Kate was kind of disgusted by people who request Power Girl sketches, and she was a little burnt out on Star Wars. I could be reading too much into it, but I felt a little insulted. I know that people tend to view me as kind of a negative or slow person because of the way I speak, so I could also just be reading her voice and phrasing wrong, just like people do with me. There are plenty of nasty trolls in the fan bases of both characters. She doesn't know me personally, and maybe her interactions at conventions or online have created a certain impression in her mind. Most of us at least occasionally spend time complaining about our customers and/or our work. I just do my complaining squirreled away in a government office building, while artists doing videos are kind of out there in the open. As an art consumer, I just interact with the art as an excited recipient. For the artist, it is just work, like me grinding away at writing a contract. It was just a couple of comments that I could be overreacting to, but watching the rest of the videos is pretty neat. I don't want this to turn into a negative review, but that stuff has been stuck in my head and I needed to get it out. I am happy with her artwork and generally enjoy her posts.

I think these sketches turned out very nicely. I like Kate Carleton's work, and she is on the list of artists I regularly search out on eBay. She's also got some licensed and unlicensed sketch cards on her webstore in a variety of price ranges, so if you like what you see here there are a couple of venues to get your own Kate Carleton original artwork.