Stranger Things Trading Cards from Topps has come in four sets -Season 1, 2, Welcome to the Upside Down, and an online exclusive Autograph Collection. Recently Topps and Zero Cool have created a new set for Season 4 but this and the previous online exclusive sets did not include sketch cards.
I’m a huge fan of Stranger Things and was excited to create artwork for these sets. A couple of years after working on the sets I also had a large Stranger Things illustration published in an artbook from Printed in Blood, which I posted about before on my website.
The Stranger Things Trading Cards Season one contained sketch cards I made that are a few years old now and although I’m highly critical of my work, and in particular my older work, I’m still quite happy with how a number of these turned out. I started experimenting with a Japanese poster paint on a few of these and I quite like the high contrast blacks I sued with the softer copics and pencil crayon colours.
How I Made My Stranger Things Trading Card Artwork
The artwork I made for the Stranger Things Trading Cards Season One set was quite varied. Some of the cards had coloured backgrounds but the figures were black and white inked sketches. Some of the other cards were coloured with copic markers and pencil crayons and others were painted with poster paints that I was trying out at the time.
Some of the drawings were a mix of ink, copic, and pencil crayons. I quite liked this approach as it brought out the blacks quite nicely. The upside down Will (above) is one of my favourites for this set and I think it still holds up pretty well.
I also made a few puzzle sketch cards for this project. I don’t tend to do a lot of puzzle cards because they aren’t packed together. That leaves collectors on what can be an endless search for the other half of the puzzle, but I do try to make each part of the puzzle stand on it’s own so if you only find one half it still looks pretty cool. One of my puzzles is shown above, where Jonathan and Nancy are laying in bed together; not sure if anyone ever found those in a pack.
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