Upper-Deck Marvel Beginnings Sketch Cards: Drawing some of my favourite superheroes and villains

Upper-Deck Marvel Beginnings Sketch Cards are now out! In the past I haven’t done too many Marvel sets but beginning with this release I’ll have another 6 Marvel projects to announce over the next year and a bit.

I’ve always been a big comic book collector. I have a massive collection plus a pull list at one of the local comic shops where I regularly collect 6-10 different titles every month. For Marvel, I’ve been a regular reader of the Fantastic Four and Daredevil, plus a bunch of other comics like X-Men, Captain Marvel, X-Statix, and more. Since this is one of the first Marvel projects I’ve worked on in some time, I figured I’d draw a lot of my personal favourite characters from the books I read like Echo, Dan Slott’s Silver Surfer, and the Fantastic Four.

marvel comics beginnings upper-deck sketch card of silver surfer and dot

marvel comics beginnings upper-deck sketch card of modok

marvel comics beginnings upper-deck sketch card of fantastic four galactus

marvel comics beginnings upper-deck sketch card of echo

Sketch'n and Paint'n

Inspired by the classic ‘floating head’ drawings of Marvel characters that once adorned the corner boxes on comic covers, I painted headshots of iconic Marvel heroes and villains on a number of my cards. These cards were painted with acrylic gouache, as seen to the left, which is an excellent type of paint that has a vibrancy and matte finish to it. It took about 15 to 45 minutes to paint each of these cards depending on the complexity, which is about what I like to spend on any of my sketch cards however artist proofs often take much longer as I go into greater detail on those.

I tend to use a limited colour palette for my paintings. For example, the Thing sketch card painting used a raw sienna, yellow, and a ultramarine blue. For Klaw I used ultramarine blue and a red (don’t remember which one specifically).

Marvel Corner Box Comic Covers

Above are some examples of the ‘floating head’ corner boxes Marvel used to frequently use on their comics. Below is a new corner box created by artist Mark Brooks, one of my favourite comic book artists. He too loved the classic ‘floating head’ corner boxes and has been drawing new ones that adorn many of the latest Marvel issues, some of which are blown up to be used as full-sized variant covers.

Fantastic Four are Back!

I love the Fantastic Four comic books and I’ve been reading them since I was a kid. For quite a long time now, the Fantastic Four characters couldn’t be drawn on UD sketch cards but that restriction was lifted for this set. I drew the classic FF characters plus the Silver Surfer, Galactus, and the Watcher. I’m a big fan of the more recent FF run by Mike Allred and Matt Fraction, so I included a few characters from that comic like Miss Thing.