Gearing Back Up

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed I'm getting a strong urge to start blogging again.  I suddenly have a lot of incoming new material, and the desire to talk about it is back as well.  I'll start off light right now though, because not much of the new hotness is here yet and I haven't scanned anything at all in a couple months.

So for today, it's just a couple really cool, very cheap sketch cards I picked up on eBay back in the early spring.  I think it was only around $8 total for the two of them.  They are both by the seller, one Joshua Dyson.

Bayley..

First up is WWE star Bayley.  The wacky wavy inflatable tube men in the background were a brilliant touch on this sketch.  Anyway, WWE has almost completely squandered the unbelievably amazing character work that made her probably the biggest star NXT had ever made to that point on the main roster almost from the jump, but anyone with a functioning brain had to figure that was gonna happen (see Wyatt, Bray).  She's awesome and I still believe in her though.

Ms. Marvel II (Kamala Khan)..

The older I get, the less time I have for angsty, sad sack superheroes with pointlessly tragic backstories.  So Kamala just spoke to me immediately, and I've been squirreling together a little collection of her ever since.  This is my second sketch card (not counting the one I drew myself), and I also have two 3x5" index card sketches (also from eBay, also pretty cheap), and a couple inserts and a magenta printing plate from various Upper Deck products.  Also I think I might have a button of her?

Anyway, as you can see, these are relatively simple sketches.  But there is a lot to like about them.  The large variance in thickness of the lines shows some very clear confidence in inking that I don't even have myself after more than a decade of being back at my drawing board.  That the lines are still rather bold even at their thinnest gives the artist's style a fairly unique voice and makes the mostly flat colors really pop.  It gives them a very cool, cartoony vibe.

I also appreciate the relative rarity of the subjects.  There's plenty of stuff of Bayley out there to collect now, but her autographs & relic cards & action figures & such often aren't often in my price range, and the opportunity to own original art of wrestlers is much, much harder to come by, especially cheap.

Kamala's been around long enough now for her to show up in a few licensed sets & on the sketch cards therein occasionally (she also has one of the very best Marvel Legends figures in recent memory, which I also own), but there's still just not that much stuff available.  There doesn't seem to be much in the way of non-licensed original art out there of her either, be it sketch cards or larger work, so I gotta jump on what I can find.

So yeah, these were a couple excellent finds and I'm grateful I was able to pick them up for so little coin.  Thanks, Joshua.  I hope you're out there somewhere still creating art.

That's all for now.  Thanks for stopping by!

Until our next...