Recent non-sport pick ups (through Dec 27th)

[weasel-king]

Wow, actually just a week in-between threads--I think that's a record for me, as I usually don't have the time to do mail threads due to the scanning 'n stuff.

I went a little overboard with some AP cards, only because are for decent trade bait.

The first is a pseudo-commission from Tony Miello (I won't get into all the details...):

A Kristin Allen Phoenix:

A Kevin Graham Carnage:

I have a few more APs incoming, too...


Now on to my "player collections".

I have a semi-commission AP from Tony Miello of Firestar (again, I won't get into all the details...):

For my Catwoman collection, these are my 34th and 35th from just Batman Archives! Done by James Cordeiro and Steve Russel respectively:

For Firestar, I have a WoM. Though not signed, I'm pretty sure it's Andy Price:

Then we move to the commissions.

First two were done by Kristin Allen. I was lucky enough to get in on a holiay "special" she offered around Halloween. These finally showed up. She does quite well drawing the ladies, so I decided to forgo my usual Firestar/Rhino choices and went with a Firestar and Mystique. Love how the Mystique is mid-morph!

The usual two characters, this time from Eugene Commodore. The second one he threw in for free since he thought he had taken too long on the first. Silly artist!

From Carlo Soriano. Something about the Firestar makes it one of my instant faves:

Ffrom Robert Kraus. I met him in person in June at AdventureCon and saw he had a quirky take on superheroes. I bought a couple off him at the show. More recently I bought a Catwoman from him off of eBay, then asked if he did commissions. The answer was "yes" so I got these the usual Rhino and Firestar, along with an *evil* Gleek for my son:

 

[Triple B]

I'm starting to really like Kristin Allen's work. I don't think I have seen one yet that I haven't liked. How many sketch cards are you up to now...?

 

[meatmancgy]

I don't get this "commissioned" thing... you can contact the artists directly to get them to do up sketch cards of your liking?!? Is there limits on what they'll draw?

 

[weasel-king]

Ryan, somewhere around 250 total, but that includes all the ones I have available and the keepers. I have maybe 10 or so still incoming.

Bruce, that's pretty much the gist of it. There is another message board where a lot of artists gather and show off their stuff, so it's easy to figure out who likes to draw what, and what they are best at drawing. For example, there are some who are quite adept at Lord of the Rings characters, some of which did contribute to the Topps releases, some who did not. Some artists do Buffy stuff, for example, since there has not been an official Buffy product with sketch cards. Some do photorealistic stuff, some do cartoonish looking things.

I'm sure there are limits, but you're dealing with the artists themselves so the limits are probably on a per-person basis. Some are comfortable doing "tasteful" nudity, some aren't. The cool thing is that they are considered personal works of art, so--while I'm far from knowledgeable about copyright law--they can get away with doing licensed characters all the time. Star Wars, LotR, Supernatural, anything. One of the big no-no sketch ideas in the three Marvel Masterpieces releases was anything from the Marvel Zombie universe. A commissioned card could venture into that territory.

I know of one person who collects sketches of Bruce Lee almost exclusively, so there are no limits from a collector's standpoint.