A High-End Marvel Sketch Booklet by Mary Bellamy

Upper Deck's Marvel Premier is one of those high-end hit-driven products that I will probably never bust a box of on my own. Each box contains just five cards, which break down as two base / parallel cards, one insert card, one standard sketch card, and one 2-, 3, or 4-panel sketch card. Although I won't ever bust a box of it on my own, that doesn't stop me from trolling eBay looking for good deals on sketches by my favorite artists. The sketch card booklets are double-sided, so you actually get extra panels depending on the size of the booklet. A 2-panel booklet actually has three panels for art, a 3-panel booklet has 5 sketch panels, and a 4-panel booklet has a whopping 7 panels available.

I was able to pick up this Scarlet Witch 2-panel booklet by artist Mary Bellamy for a decent sum. The multi-panel format really gives artists a chance to open up. Some do multiple shots of the same character, as seen on this card. Some do a large shot of one character that takes up all of the space on a side, some do group shots featuring multiple characters, and some do a mixture of the above. I am not even really a Scarlet Witch fan, but for whatever reason sketches of her seems to bring out the best in artists. Based on my non-scientific evaluation (looking at tons of sketch cards on eBay), something about her costume / color scheme / power set just lends itself to sketch card art.

The outside of the booklet features a sketch panel on the front cover and all the legal stuff on the back cover, where many artists choose to place their signature. I was pretty happy to land this sketch booklet, and I like Bellamy's art style. I like that she tends to use a lot of bright colors and her cartoony style appeals to me. I have built a nice little collection of her work through various avenues. I've e-mailed back and forth with her, interacted with her briefly on Twitter, purchased a couple of her published My Little Pony variant covers, commissioned some PSCs (Personal Sketch Cards) from her, purchased an artist return from her, and now I've bought some of her work from eBay.

Mary Bellamy Sketch Card Commission

Mary Bellamy is one of the artists that posts occasionally on the Blowout Cards forums. She has worked on many sketch card sets, self-published several comic books, and also has done work for publisher-owned comic book properties. Her most high-profile work is probably the covers she has done for the My Little Pony comic books.

  

A few months ago she posted a thread offering discounted sketches to help cover some unexpected car repairs she was getting done. I jumped at the chance to get a My Little Pony sketch card from her, featuring a situation from an episode of the Friendship is Magic animated series. In the episode, the character Fluttershy steals the Princess' sick bird, Philomena, in an attempt to restore it to health. After Fluttershy has tried many remedies the bird escapes and leads Fluttershy on a chase, which ends with the bird combusting and falling into a pile of ashes just as the Princess shows up. Fluttershy offers many apologies, and in the midst of the apology the bird comes back from the dead as a beautiful Phoenix. It's a pretty funny episode, and I asked Mary if she could draw Fluttershy and Philomena for me. It wasn't too long before I had this Personal Sketch Card in my mailbox:

I also selected three more cards from her sketch binder, featuring some of my favorite comic book characters. Before sending the cards off to me, Mary took some time and added extra details to the background of each card. I thought that was a nice addition.

The first sketch shows Cloak and Dagger, two relatively minor Spider-Man characters who became fan favorites and still pop up in books from time to time. For a while they even had their own series. 

In the middle is She-Hulk, Bruce Banner's cousin who received her powers after he gave her an emergency blood transfusion.

Last is Power Girl who, like most DC characters, has a complicated and ever-changing back story. She is Superman's cousin from an alternate universe, or basically another universe's Supergirl. She gets bounced back and forth between the different universes. I think that currently she is back on her original adopted home planet, Earth-2.

Star Wars Masterwork Artist Return Sketch Card - Princess Leia by Mary Bellamy

When the Star Wars Masterwork set was released I set out to look for a few decent sketch cards for my collection. I pulled a couple of sketches from the box I opened and I purchased one sketch from eBay. One artist whose sketches interested me was Mary Bellamy. I had exchanged messages with her on the Blowout Cards forums and purchased/commissioned some stuff from her.

When companies do a product with sketch cards, they often give the artists a handful of cards to do sketches on and sell on their own. Sometimes the cards look the same as the pack-pulled sketch cards and sometimes they have an 'Artist's Proof' or 'Artist Return' stamp on them. I believe these cards make up a large portion of an artist's income from a set. I saw some of Bellamy's Star Wars Masterwork Artist Returns cards in the video she did to show off her cards from the set and inquired about one of the Princess Leia sketches she had done. She told me that Topps had kept them and she was having a little trouble getting them back, but that she would reserve one if Topps sent anything back to her. 

Eventually Topps got some of her cards back to her and I was able to get this one to add to my collection, an illustration of Leia in her hooded white dress. I like the colors that Bellamy uses, and her style is cartoony without being too simple. I'm not sure I remember that wallpaper in the background from the movies, though, but perhaps this is from some off-screen scene where Leia visits her grandmother's house.

Here is the back of the card. I can't find any markings on this card to differentiate it from the pack-pulled sketches, so in this case it looks like Topps didn't do anything special to mark the Artist Returns. Eventually I need to get around to showing the other sketches I got from Mary Bellamy, but that's not going to happen today.