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Topps Wacky Packages 50th Anniversary Sketch Cards

This past summer I received a great opportunity from Topps to work on their Wacky Packages: 50th Anniversary trading cards. This is one of the first times I’ve had the opportunity to work on something very cartoony, and it was quickly followed up by a chance to work on Garbage Pail Kids, which I posted about earlier.

wrapper from 1970s package of topps wacky packagesThis set was a lot of fun to work on partly because it wasn’t something I was familiar with. Wacky Packages are an original creation by Topps from back in the late 1960s that parodied famous products and their marketing campaigns. This product was highly popular with kids throughout the 60s to today, and older collectors continue to buy these trading cards with new parodies continuing to be made. The recent Wacky Packages trading cards have, like most trading card sets today, hits in packages that come in the form of artist autographs, short printed cards, and hand-drawn sketch cards.

For my part in this project I created a small amount of hand-drawn sketch cards. In this particular series of Wacky Packages, the imagery was based off the original series of trading cards from the 60s and 70s to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the product. I created a small run of the traditional, 2.5×3.5″ sketch cards and six double panel, dual artist sketch cards. The double panel cards had myself illustrate a drawing on one side and another artist work on the other half. In my sample page below I have the three that were sent to me with another artist’s artwork on it (an artist by the moniker of Smok’n Joe) and to the right of those were mine that I did and then sent off to another artist. I don’t know who worked on the other half of these cards but would love to know who did! If you see one of my dual artist sketch cards, please drop me a line and let me know!

For the first time, on some of these cards I used Sakura Poster Color EX paint. This paint was recommended to my by another artist for its vibrancy. I used this paint on all of the dual panel cards and some of the regular cards. For the rest of the cards I used my usual medium of Copic markers. I really enjoyed using these paints and you’ll probably see this medium pop up a few more times in upcoming projects!

Examples of My Wacky Sketch Cards
wacky packages 50th anniversary sketch cards drawn by matt stewart 2017
wacky packages 50th anniversary sketch cards drawn by matt stewart 2017
Artist Returns

I have a small amount of artist return sketch cards from this project. I haven’t had the time to draw anything on these yet, but hopefully in the next month or so I will! Once I do I’ll make sure to post these cards here for sale!

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