Sketch Card Mania!

My scan folder is packed with photos, and it's to the point where it's a little overwhelming to even open it and look for things to post. A lot of the photos have been there for months, and I'd be willing to bet there are a few photos that might be in their second year of scan folder purgatory. Yesterday I posted Part 1 of a crazy package I got from an eBay seller, but it might be a while before I can get to Part 2. That post requires a lot of research, because there is stuff in there I've never seen before. So instead I am posting something fairly light today.

There are a lot of sketch cards on eBay. I was browsing one seller's listings yesterday, and that one seller alone had over 1200 sketches listed. There are so many sketch cards that it's pretty much impossible to even sift through them properly. I think a lot of sellers are having a hard time moving their sketch backlog, too, as prices seem to be down across the board, even for some of the high-demand artists. A while back I noticed that one seller I follow was blowing out a large number of sketches, so I put some bids in to see what I might get. I missed on quite a few of them, but I also hit on a few. There isn't much rhyme or reason to them. I bid on them because I liked them.

First up is a sketch of Kilowog (a member of the Green Lantern Corps) and Sinestro (a bad guy with similar powers but in Yellow, not sure if there is a Yellow Lantern Corps) from Cryptozoic's DC: Epic Battles card set. I believe the artist is Jeff Victor. He also has a DeviantArt profile, but I think that  his blog has been updated more recently. I am more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, and Green Lantern has never been one of the books I follow at all, but I thought this was a cool sketch and the price was right. For anyone curious about it, when it comes to DC I mostly follow Flash, Wonder Woman, Power Girl, and the occasional offshoot like the recent DC Bombshells series and some of the sillier Harley Quinn stuff.

This next sketch comes from another Cryptozoic set, the DC: Super-Villains release. No, this is not die-cut to be something inappropriate, it is shaped to resemble the Hall of Doom, headquarters of the Injustice League. The DC: Justice League set has sketches die-cut to resemble the Hall of Justice, their respective headquarters building. You can kind of see the features of the Hall of Doom illustrated on the back of the card underneath all the text and logos.

Back to the artwork, this is a sketch of Batman villain Scarecrow done by artist Gabby Untermayerova. I like her work, but she doesn't seem to have much of a web presence outside of sketch cards that pop up for sale. I thought this was a pretty cool sketch, and I wanted one of these die-cuts from the Super-Villains set. She is the artist who did the mini sketch card I picked up from the Downton Abbey set a while back. There are a couple of her full-size sketches out there for sale that are on my watch list from that set, as someday I would like to add one to my collection and really complete my Downton Abbey master set.

The priciest sketch I picked up in this lot was this Vampirella sketch from Breygent's Women of Dynamite set. Although it was the most expensive card in this lot, I still got it for well under the going rate for most of his color sketches. He's got a nice clean art style that I really like. He is the founder of a sketch card group on Facebook where a lot of the sketch artists post their work and talk about their processes. He recently stepped down as the admin, but The Sketch Card Fanatics is still a pretty active group. He has a website, but there isn't anything on it, so here is his Facebook art page instead. I didn't really expect to get this card because Popular Artist + Bewbz + $$, but I got lucky. It's a pretty nice card and I don't have much Vampirella in my collection. Her costume doesn't really lend itself well to family life, I suppose. This card is pretty tastefully done, though, so I think it's okay.

Finally, here is a Hellboy sketch done by artist Renae De Liz. This sketch came from the Inkworks Hellboy: Sword of Storms set. It is serially-numbered to # 239 / 246, and I think it's a pretty cool scene. Most sketch cards have the character right up in your face, but this one works well. You can still tell it's Hellboy. Renae De Liz has hit the big time as a comic book artist, so I am not sure if she does sketch cards anymore. I think her most recent big-name project is DC's The Legend of Wonder Woman.

I got all of these sketches together for about what you might easily spend on one decent sketch card, so that felt pretty good. I've been focusing on sketch cards quite a bit lately, much to the detriment of my other collections. I just think artwork is really neat, and there is a variety there that you don't get in baseball cards.

At Long Last, the Downton Abbey Master Set is Complete*

For the last couple of years my wife and I have been working hard at erasing the financial mistakes of our 20's and early 30's, when we built up a sizable amount of debt by buying silly things. In early 2015 we really got down to business and our balances began to shrink. It's been pretty slow at times but we've been chipping away at it and we've made consistent progress for the first time, paying down about 20% of our credit card balances since we began our program. It is really tough but every time we pay off another account it frees up that monthly payment for other things, so our standard of living gets better and we are able to pay down more of our balances every month. It's still embarrassing how much we pay in interest every month, but at least now we are taking productive measures to improve our position.

This brings us to a windfall we came into recently. After talking about it some we decided that most of the money would go straight to our worst debt, a credit card that has plagued us since the early days of our marriage. We should be able to pay off the balance on that card and be done with it forever with this money and our tax return. It's a pretty big deal, as cutting that balance will reduce our credit balance by another 15% or so. The other part of the plan was to set aside some spending money for each of us to celebrate the progress we've made and help us get through another year of paying down balances. My wife is having trouble deciding what she wants, but I have a whole list ready at all times for just such an occasion. Today's card is the first arrival from my list:

I believe it was in late 2014 that I purchased a whole case of Cryptozoic's Downton Abbey trading cards (probably one of the crazy expenditures that led to the start of our debt elimination program), hoping to put together a master set of the product. I came close, but I was still missing a few things. I picked up a couple of missing autographs from eBay and Blowout forum sellers; I was able to source the last singles from the mini parallel set from another Blowout forum member and some British sellers; I got the special binder with the exclusive wardrobe card from an online card shop; I ordered the special Non-Sport Update magazine issue with the standard promo card; and I waited a long time and spent way too much money to get the limited edition metal promo card that was only distributed at a card show in Britain.

The one thing that eluded me was a sketch card. The sketches came in two varieties; full-size sketch cards and tobacco-sized mini sketches. They are quite uncommon, falling at less than one per case. The ones that have been sitting on eBay forever are all pretty pricey. This mini-sized sketch card was the cheapest of the lot and luckily it features my favorite character from the show, Mr. Carson, the butler of Downton Abbey. The sketch was done by Gabby Untermayerova, who doesn't seem to have much of a web presence at the moment. I've had it saved in my eBay want list for what seems like years, always worrying that it would be sold before I got around to hitting the Buy It Now button. Now it's mine.

*At this point I am pretty much calling my set complete, although in theory I would still need a full-size sketch from the set to have a representation of everything available. That's going to carry a pretty big price tag, though, even for the cheapest full-size sketch available. I'll probably have to think for another year or so on that. Most of the sketches out there have already been posted for that long or more, so they'll probably still be around then. Someday I need to scan and photograph everything I've gathered and do a nice comprehensive post on the set. That's a lot of work, though, so it's going to be a while before I get around to it.