Quicksilver by Mike Hartigan

I don't go outside of my established sketch card collections all that often, but every so often I will pick something up that isn't on my usual list. Usually it's because someone is running a sale or I am chasing an artist who hasn't done artwork featuring my favorite characters (or they have, but I missed out on it).

I haven't seen any artwork from Mike Hartigan featuring Power Girl or Leia, but I really like his art style. Last year I got one of his Captain America sketches from Upper Deck's Avengers: Age of Ultron set. I think I also got the pictured Quicksilver sketch from the same set late last year, but it's been sitting in my post queue for a while. I don't like the Quicksilver character very much, but I thought this sketch of the speedster was too good to pass up. He's got an awesome cartoony style, and he uses a lot of bright colors that really pop. It looks like he's having a sale in his webstore right now. His normal prices are really good, and his sale prices are even better. He also has commission prices listed at the top of his Facebook page. I'll definitely be looking for more of his work in the future, and maybe I'll even go the commission route! I've been commissioning quite a few sketch cards from artists recently, and it's pretty exciting to get exactly what you wanted in the artist's signature style.

Sketch Card Week: Captain America by Mike Hartigan

I've been neglecting my sports card collection in favor of sketch cards lately. I still pick up plenty of sports cards, but a lot of the sports cards I try to pick up each year (Topps Series 1 set, Topps Series 2 set, Heritage base set + SP's, Archives base set, Stadium Club base set) have fallen by the wayside. I might get around to all that stuff at some point, I might try to chase some of that stuff but not all, or I might just write 2016 off as a lost year for my baseball collection. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, I've been picking up some sketch cards for my collection. The market is absolutely flooded with sketch cards right now. That means prices are lower on a lot of sketches, and if you stalk the listings enough you can often even grab art from a high-demand artist at a discount. That's bad for artists, but good for collectors (at least until the artists get tired of getting low-balled and quit making cool art). I've got enough in my queue now that I can do a week of sketch card posts.

I'll kick this thing off with a very 4th of July-appropriate sketch of Captain America. This sketch card was done by artist Mike Hartigan for the 2015 Upper Deck Avengers: Age of Ultron set. I really like Hartigan's art style, and he's done a lot to make this card really pop, with the planes in the background, the spotlight cutting through the sky, and the details on Captain America himself. It's just a really cool illustration and I am pretty happy that I was able to get it for my collection. I'll definitely be looking for more Hartigan sketches in the future.

An Avengers: Age of Ultron Sketch by Kate Carleton

I've been trying to build my post queue up, but I have mixed feelings about it. Right now I'm five days out on posts, so I am writing this five days ago. Things that are current now won't be current when you read this post on Thursday, and it is highly likely that something of note will occur during that time. So if I'm ahead on posts there is a risk that the content will no longer be relevant upon publication, but if I don't get ahead on my posts I am always under the gun to get a post written out for the current day. Probably the right answer is to just get photos processed and loaded up, but save the actual post writing for one or two days out. But the real right answer is just to get as many posts as I can written whenever the blogging bug hits me, so that when real life interferes or I get into a motivational slump I still have stuff ready to go. None of that has anything to do with today's card, though. It's just what I've been thinking about.

This is a sketch card from 2015 Upper Deck Avengers: Age of Ultron. The sketch is Avengers character Scarlet Witch, done by artist Kate Carleton. I've mentioned a few times that I don't especially like Scarlet Witch as a character, but it seems like there are a lot of good sketch cards out there featuring her. That means that when I am trying to track down a certain artist for my collection it is likely that I might end up with a Scarlet Witch sketch.

Kate Carleton is one of the artists I'd been trying to track down to add to my collection, and this sketch was the right one for my collection. It sat in my Watch List for a long time and I always figured that someone else was going to snag it before I got around to buying it.