Comic Book Sketch Cards by Anastasia Catris

I picked up a few sketches from the latest waves of March of Dimes sketches on eBay. The Princess Leia sketch I showed off a couple of days ago came second-hand from a person who'd originally picked it up from the March of Dimes charity auctions run by steve4mod. The ones I'm posting today came from bidding on the actual auction listings. There were quite a few nice cards in the last couple of waves from Year 6, but a lot of them went well outside of my price range. I was still able to land two very nice sketches by artist Anastasia Catris, though.

This first one features Captain Marvel, a character I'm a fan of, but one that I don't have much of a sketch collection for outside of one I purchased last year by an unknown artist. Now I've got two Captain Marvel sketches, and I am pretty happy with this one. I tend to be drawn in by bright colors and interesting backgrounds, and this sketch definitely has those qualities. It's a great depiction of the character.

I also won this sketch of Black Cat, one of Spider-Man's frenemies. I especially like the spiderweb in the background and the way Catris stylized her hair. I have to imagine that Black Cat is one of the harder characters to draw, as her suit is all black and her hair is white, which are respectively hard to highlight and shade convincingly. Those are two colors I really struggle with in my miniature painting.

These are two high-quality sketches that I really stole for a song. You can find links to Catris' store and social media profiles on her website, where she has original art for sale as well as commission information.

An Unidentified Artist and a Flying Banana

I picked up this sketch card a while ago, figuring that it would be pretty easy to track down the name of the artist. So far I haven't had much luck in that department. The character depicted is Carol Danvers/Ms. Marvel as Captain Marvel, and the card comes from the 2014 Upper Deck Guardians of the Galaxy set.

I thought it was a pretty good depiction of the character, and I think I got a decent discount on it due to the lack of an artist name on the card. There is a signature on the back, but I haven't been able to tie it down to a known name from the sketch artist list for this product. I could probably put more effort into it, but I haven't got around to it yet. One cool thing about Carol Danvers is that she's a member of the United States Air Force, and that is my awkward way of tying this in to my visit to the Hill Aerospace Museum at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, this morning.

It's not quite as large as the big Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, but it's still worth a visit. The bigger aircraft are outside, like your large bombers (B-29, B-1, B-52), cargo planes (C-130, C-7, C-123, C-47), and assorted other stuff, like this H-21 Workhorse helicopter, which carries the nickname "Flying Banana" due to its shape.

This is a picture from the balcony housing the museum's art collection. This building holds the older generations of airplanes. Highlights for me were the P-51, B-17, P-38, and the TH-13T. This museum was much better lit than the one in Dayton, which I thought was better for viewing the different parts of the aircraft. Many of the aircraft also had panels opened up so that you could see some of the internal features, like machine gun mounts, cockpits, and the various electronic modules sitting in their brackets. I don't recall seeing as much of that at the other museum.

I didn't take a photo in the other building, but it housed the newer stuff. The big highlight for me in that room was the SR-71 Blackbird. I wanted to look at the F-15 and the A-10, but there was an Air Force unit there having some kind of ceremony, and I didn't want to be that guy milling around while officers make speeches about someone's retirement or promotion.

Overall it was a good place to spend a couple of hours. I've seen most of the aircraft before in one form or another, but it's hard to get tired of looking at military equipment. The exhibits did a good job of tying each aircraft to Utah's history, as well as some interesting stuff about military involvement in Alaska, like the building of the Alaska-Canadian Highway and the recovery of the museum's P-38 many years after it crash-landed in Alaska.