Putting My Cards On the Table

Click for larger image.

In a continuing effort to shore up my shrinking income, I have recently embarked on a journey into the wonderful world of sketch card production.

For those who don’t know, collectible “art trading cards” are a strange variation on the old “bubble gum” baseball cards of the past. The stick of bubble gum has long since been excised from the package and the collecting and speculative selling of such sports-themed cards has become big business.

Meanwhile in the alternate nerd universe, Dungeons and Dragons style gaming morphed into fantasy adventure card games like Magic: The Gathering and Call of Cthulhu. These cards featured fantasy art by some pretty talented illustrators, and later art cards without games attached were produced. It wasn’t long before the comics industry jumped on the bandwagon and began creating collectible card sets featuring reproduced renderings of their characters by top industry pros.

In addition to the printed art, many sets of collectible cards include a small number of original art renderings drawn directly onto blank cards.

This is where I come in.

With the help of experienced sketch card artists and generous amigos, Elaine and Tony Perna, I was quickly ushered into a job for Breygent Marketing, and their manager Tom Breyer offered me 25 original sketch cards for a Vampirella card series. These pics have recently been approved, and I’m now able to post a few on-line.

A terrific sketch card by old pro Tony Perna
For more of Tony's work, click this!

While the pay for individual cards is not high, one is also sent a certain number of extra blank cards known as “artist proofs” which are officially sanctioned cards in the series and can be sold by the artist on the open market for the best negotiated price. This, presumably, is where the artist evens up the pay rate, and I am curious to see how that pans out in the end.

Thanks to Breygent Marketing I now have some good samples to show and hope to land some new clients soon.