Sketch Card Week: Leia by Jason Keith Phillips

I am trying to beat my self-imposed deadline to write a Sketch Card Week post today. So far passively watching UFC Fight Night is a lot more interesting to me than trying to come up with words about cards. Then after that ended I saw the news about the police officers being shot in Texas and I really didn't feel like posting, but I tend to subscribe to the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' mentality when faced with tragedy. If criminals and terrorists keep me from doing the things I would normally do out of fear or sadness, then they win. So I'm going to write this post and get it out there before midnight strikes.

This sketch card comes from one of the Topps Star Wars Galactic Files sets, but I am not sure which one. There were a lot of them, and I haven't researched them all. I got it from eBay and the auction listing also didn't mention which specific Galactic Files set this was from. I am not sure if the design of the sketch cards was different from set to set or not, so maybe that branding on the front or the picture on the back would be an easy tell upon me doing some research. Well, I didn't do any research.

I am familiar with the artist, however, as I have picked up some of his work in the past. Jason Keith Phillips has done quite a bit of sketch card work, although I think he recently (as in, within the last six months or so, I have no real sense of time passing) announced on his Facebook page that he is moving away from work on corporate-owned properties to focus on his own creations. I thought this was a pretty neat rendition of Leia and the price was right, so I snapped it up. I really ought to sit down one day and count up how many Leia sketches I have now. It has to be more than ten at this point, I would think. It's a pretty cool sketch. I was happy to make it a part of my collection.

My thoughts go out to the police who were attacked tonight in Texas. Law Enforcement Officers have a tough job. I think I will leave it at that.

Sketch Card Week: Perna Studios Spellcasters II Fairy by Loren Bobbitt

Sketch Card Week continues with a sketch from the Perna Studios Spellcasters II: Enchanted Realms set. This is a small-press set that focuses strongly on sketch cards. The sets put out by Perna Studios seem to have a fanatical fan base, with products selling out within minutes of release and an active buying/selling/trading community. I think their releases are pretty cool and they offer sketches from some of the biggest artists around, but I haven't made much of an attempt at collecting any of their sets. I like them, but I have so many other collections that it's hard to justify collecting another thing.

Spellcasters II is the most recent release from Perna Studios, and amid all the excitement on Facebook and the card forums I toyed with the idea of building a reverse set of the product, buying a base+insert set and a sketch to go with it. I've gotten as far as the sketch card, but never followed up on the base+insert set thing. This card came from eBay by way of a seller who had several sketches from the set up for sale. Loren Bobbitt is the artist on this card, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't instantly connected her name with that of the infamous Lorena Bobbitt. They aren't the same person, but I did get a bit of a giggle out of the similarity. I'm sure that half the people who talk to her bring up the connection, and she is probably totally sick of it. This card features a fairy using a dandelion seed as a wand. Bobbitt's sketch cards aren't extremely common, but she has done sketch cards for a couple of Marvel sets and also attends conventions as an artist. Her work is pretty good generally, and I wouldn't mind seeing her art pop up in more sketch card sets.

Sketch Card Week: Power Girl by Danny Silva

It's Day 2 of Sketch Card Week, and today's card comes from a set that is going to be pretty common this week, Cryptozoic's DC Comics: The Women of Legend. I am struggling to get Sketch Card Week off the ground. I have the cards scanned, but getting the posts written has become a challenge. I spent the 4th of July rafting on the Payette River with my family, and I am absolutely exhausted. It was a fun time, but it wore me out.

This sketch card features the character Power Girl by artist Danny Silva. The eyes on this Power Girl are pretty creepy, but I think it's a really neat piece of art. He did a few other characters for this set in this style as well as a few others with a more traditional look. I think I prefer these ones, as they stand out a bit more from the crowd. I am actually a little surprised that DC let these through the approval process. The comic companies seem to be pretty strict about how their characters are drawn on sketch cards, although I think Marvel / Disney are more strict than DC when it comes to depicting characters exactly how they appear currently in comics. Silva is pretty active across his social media accounts, which are all linked to from his website.

That's about all for this post. I need to get some sleep so that I can recover from today's festivities. I am glad that I was able to get this card for my collection, and I hope to add more work by Danny Silva to my collection in the future.

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 American Pastime in Canada

I am writing this a couple of days ago, so the standings are likely a bit different today than they were then. After an extended hot streak, the Astros are contending with teams like Kansas City and Toronto for the second Wild Card spot. There is still plenty of season left to play and anything could happen, but I am glad they've pulled themselves back into contention rather than hanging out at the bottom of the standings with Oakland and Los Angeles (of Anaheim).

I picked up this card of one of Toronto's pitchers from an eBay seller. I was kind of surprised to see it as a Buy It Now with a low price, but I snapped it up before anyone else had a chance to grab it. R.A. Dickey's cards aren't exactly on fire right now, but he still has a decent following and the seller probably could have got more for this card. I half-expected that the seller would cancel the sale or that the card would arrive with some major flaw that I had missed in the photos. None of that happened, though. This is the Green parallel of Dickey's card from the 2013 Panini America's Pastime Baseball, numbered # 06 / 10. It is kind of funny that this card is from a set celebrating America while featuring a player on a Canadian team.

This card kind of bothers me because of that flagpole on the back that runs across the text box for his height. I scanned the card a couple of times because I thought it was a dog hair on the scanner glass. I am sometimes a little slow on the uptake. I'm just really used to having to re-scan cards because of dog hair. That is the price I pay for liking large dogs with lots of fur. It's not a hair. It's part of the design of the card.

Danica Patrick 2012 Press Pass Showcase - Coke Zero 400

This week's race is the Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. Danica Patrick has had pretty good luck at this track, although she is a couple of years removed from her best showings there. Overall her average start here is 16.20 and her average finish is 18.69, so if she sticks to her averages she's got a pretty good shot at a Top 20 or better finish as long as she can stay running. She has 1 Pole here and two 8th-place finishes at the track.

This is another of the Danica Patrick parallels I picked up in an eBay lot a little while ago. It comes from the 2012 Press Pass Showcase Racing product, and this is the Red parallel. Pretty fancy stuff, and it's the lowest-numbered card in this lot as copy # 22 / 25. I guess that's about all there is to say about it. I hope everyone has a good weekend and for those celebrating the 4th of July, try not to pull a Jason Pierre-Paul with your fireworks.

From like the 25-second mark until he delivers his cheesy line about tackling fireworks, you can see that other dude isn't even paying attention to what Jason Pierre-Paul is saying anymore. He's thinking, "Don't mess up your line, don't mess up your line, it's almost time, don't mess this up!" I did a lot of stupid stuff with fireworks when I was a kid and I'm probably lucky that the worst thing that happened was setting a tree on fire. We were able to put it out pretty fast, so nothing worse came of it. A couple of nights ago some kids knocked over some fireworks out in the foothills and the resulting wildfire burnt over 1000 acres, along with one home.

N20 Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens 25: Silver-Spangled Polish

Just like yesterday's bird, here is a chicken that I don't have a lot of information on. There is a fair amount of information on the Polish in general, but the Silver-Spangled variety seems to have fallen out of favor since this card was released in around 1891. I did find an illustration of some Silver-Spangled Polish chickens from a book published in 1880, so this was definitely a thing that existed back then. There are also a whole ton of different color varieties of the Polish bird, so it is conceivable that these still exist somewhere, especially as I found some very similar birds like Silver-Laced Polish. The Polish breed itself is really only rumored to be from Poland, as no one really knows where they came from. Some people say they came from the Netherlands. They are a relatively small chicken, and are mostly used these days as show birds or to dress up backyard flocks with their fancy feathered crests.

This N20 1891 Allen & Ginter Fifty Prize & Game Chickens card came from the same eBay lot as the last several cards I've shown. It is the last card from that lot, and is probably in the roughest condition out of the bunch. It's a bit dirty and the surface is pocked and lined in spots. Not enough, though, to make this card undesirable to me. As my 25th card from the set, it brings me halfway to completion of the set.