Sunday, October 5, 2008

The problem with sketch cards

It seems that non-sports sets these days are pretty much required to include sketch cards. There are the obvious Batman Archives-type sets that are based on comic books. Those scream "sketch me", but do we really need sketch cards for something like CSI?

In any event, someone on a message board I frequent is in love with Heroes cards. I've seen a few sketch cards of Hiro that I really liked, so I hopped over to our friendly neighborhood pimp, eBay. I came across a couple that are terrible as far as sketch cards go.

No disrespect to the artists, as they can clearly do better than I ever could have, but who are these people supposed to be? (Images shamefully ripped from the auction descriptions.)

The above is supposed to be Claire. Again, it's better than what I could attempt, but it looks a lot like a character on one of my wife's soap operas who most certainly isn't Claire.

The next example is:

This is Niki? According to the description it is, but I'm not seeing it. I understand there are intentional stylized renditions (see Mark McHaley from Batman Archives), but faux-Niki is pretty bad. I can only imagine the look on the person's face who pulled that one.

So is this an easy way to differentiate between high-end sketches and the "rest"? High-end sketches actually resemble the person they are supposed to?

Sorry, but a crappy sketch card by a great artist is still a crappy sketch card.

UPDATE: The soap opera "Claire" gal is, after some investigation, Leven Ramblin from All My Children. Here's a small pic:

Thanks to my wife for pointing me in the right direction on that one.

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