Upper-Deck Marvel Premier Sketch Cards: Small, Medium, and Big!

One of the fun and different aspects to working on the Upper-Deck Marvel Premier set is that the sketch cards come in a few different shapes and sizes, although that also meant a lot more work! There were the regular sketch cards that have a character name printed on the front with a window area above for the drawing to be made. These were on high quality and thick paper stock – 130pt thickness if you were to put in a one-touch. I’ve seen that some artists had their drawings cross over the entire surface of these cards but I opted to keep mine within the window. Most of my drawings were pen & marker drawings but a few were painted with acrylic gouache and all of those were shoulder up or portraits. All of my artist proof sketch cards were of this single card variety but they don’t have a character specified on them so I can draw whoever on the card.

Double, triple, and quad panel cards were another type of sketch card I worked on for this project. These had drawings on the fronts and the backsides, and I could draw whatever I wanted as no character name was printed on them. The backside also had an area with the product information and an area for me to sign. For the subject matter I drew a few ‘versus’ type cards like Ironman versus one of his villains. For the majority of the cards I did teams as that was an easy way to figure out which multiple characters to draw on the front and backs of the cards. I chose comic characters I’ve liked and collected comics of but where somewhat less obscure like the Thunderbolts, Cloak and Dagger, and the New Mutants.

The last type of card I worked on was a 5×7″ oversized sketch card. I opted to do portraits of iconic Marvel characters on these, including Captain America, Daredevil, Hulk, Scarlet Witch, and Ironman. Although the portraits were simple in comparison to the multiple character cards, I used acrylic  gouache to render the portraits. This was a very time consuming process that I think brought out a unique result that hopefully collectors will appreciate.