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.

Wonder Woman Sketch Card by Bianca Thompson

One artist I've had on my wish list for a long time is Bianca Thompson, who has a very distinctive airbrushed art style. I've chased quite a few of her cards on eBay, but it took a while for me to actually win one that matched my collecting interests. I was kicking myself a bit for missing out on a really cool Princess Leia sketch she listed a while back. I think I forgot it was ending and took a nap or something, and by the time I got back on the computer it had ended. A little while later this Wonder Woman sketch popped up and I won it. She takes commissions so I guess I could have asked her to get on the commission list for a Leia, but to be honest I didn't think of that until now.

She's got a decent inventory in her eBay store that covers a wide variety of comic book, movie, and other pop culture subjects. She has also worked on a few licensed sketch card sets, so other sellers occasionally list pack-pulled stuff she's done. I like her art because it's distinctive. No one else in the sketch card world really does what she does. I am drawn toward artists whose work stands out, so when I am scrolling through the sketch card listings I can recognize their work at a glance. You can see some of her other artwork on the back of the sketch card as well as on the business card she included in the envelope:

You can see that she also does sketches on blank comic book covers, and I think the Rosie the Riveter-inspired Wonder Woman there is available as a poster or a print. Her website has got galleries of quite a bit of her stuff, and like I mentioned before her eBay shop is usually pretty well-stocked.