Burdick Award, Part 3: My Influences

Burdick Award, Part 3: My Influences

My career as an artist began when I first discovered a book of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters. I was seven or eight at the time, and even though I had no real idea what exactly I was looking at, what I did know was that this was what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Over the years I have had many other influences: Edward Penfield, Ludwig Hohlwein, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol, Mary Cassatt, J. C. Leyendecker – I can go on and on. Each of those artists had a profound effect on my art or my thinking about art in some form or another.

Believe it or not, I developed the art style I use for my cards out of necessity. When I started my little blog in 2010, I had just quit my agency job and launched my own graphic art studio. That meant not only did I work as a designer and illustrator, but that I also had to find those jobs, act as an account rep for those clients, and manage all the financial and business matters that come with running that business. As a result, there was little time left for creating time-consuming baseball player illustrations just for fun.

Back then, I generally worked in four distinct illustration styles and media: pen and ink, colored pencils, graphite, and gouache. If I were to do a colored pencil portrait, a 14”x17” piece would typically take me several days. Spending that much time on something I was doing in the evenings for my own enjoyment would have been out of the question. I needed to come up with a style I could do quickly, but that still looked good. After playing around with several different methods and styles, I settled on the one you see today.

 

The key to this style is the black line work. This is often associated with comic book art, but I wanted to differentiate from that and make it as realistic as I could, while still being simple and relatively quick to execute.

What I finally developed is very different from the other styles I have worked in since the 1980s, but one I have been attracted to for as long as I can remember. Where did I see that style, you might ask?

I always loved the crude but somehow endearing 1920s strip cards.

 

These cards were distributed to candy stores and corner markets in long strips or sheets and either sold for a penny or two or given out with a piece of candy. The clerk would just cut off however many cards the customer paid for. Because these are hand-cut, they more often than not look like Zorro did it after downing a dozen tequilas and popping a xanax.

On top of the bad trim jobs, the cards themselves were often poorly done – crude would be a nice term. However, I was always attracted to the bold color blocks and stark black outlines. To me, there’s just something neat about them, even if they don’t always look like their subjects.

 

You know something’s off with the artwork when you’d be less frightened to meet Lon Chaney in a dark alley than little Jackie Coogan.

Another set that inspired my current style is the 1947 Signal Oil cards.

 

These cards were illustrated by a guy named Al Demaree. In 1906, Demaree started playing semipro ball for a few bucks on the side while attending art school in Chicago. Turned out he was a pretty good pitcher, and he spent 1912 to 1919 in the major leagues. In the off-season, he had a vaudeville act where he’d set up an easel on stage and draw cartoons while telling baseball anecdotes to the audience. This was decades before TV, so this was real must-see entertainment back then. Anyway, Demaree’s drawings began appearing in newspapers, and he had a good art career all ready to go when his baseball one ended.

These Signal Oils are very cool looking in my opinion, and completely unlike any other card set out there. I particularly like the movement and energy he puts into his line work. The Sig Jakucki and the Vince DiMaggio are especially dynamic. Demaree’s work shows that just because there’s only one color and simple line work, it doesn’t mean the illustration has to be static.

One thing that many people bring up when talking about my cards is the skies. Instead of using a blue sky with white clouds for everyone, I tend to use different color combos that either complement or starkly contrast with the colors in the portraits. This makes for some odd combos, but I think they work for some reason. There are precedents for weirdly colored skies in a few older card sets.

The 1888 Goodwin cards are just beautiful overall. Whoever the artist was at the lithography company was truly top-notch. Besides the very expressive portraits of the players, one notices right off the bat the skies: the colors are vibrant, and the clouds are dramatic. Just outstanding.

 

Another early set that employed backgrounds atypical of baseball cards is the 1910 Obak tobacco cards.

 

These four examples have colorful skies reminiscent of the 1888 Goodwins, giving the illustrations a unique, almost moody feel.

My card drawings are sometimes influenced by cards that are not baseball at all.

 

The artist R. Crumb became famous for his album covers in the 1960s and later for his counterculture comics. He also dabbled in trading cards, producing sets of blues musicians, jazz band leaders, country music legends, and, get this: French accordion players of the 1920s and 30s. What I like about his cards is the animation he puts into each portrait subject. While many artists stay true to their reference and depict the person just as he or she appears in the photo they are using, Crumb gives his portraits an expressiveness that brings them to life. This is something I always try to bring to my own illustrations, and one of the biggest compliments I ever had was from the late ESPN columnist Jim Caple: “Cieradkowski’s artwork is able to capture the player far better than the photos you find in a typical baseball card. These players are more alive, more real than any faded photo. I almost expect them to leap off the card and demand $50 in exchange for an autograph.”

Jim expressed exactly what I try to do with my baseball illustrations.

There’s another type of cards that have a lot in common with my own, though I must confess I was not too familiar with them back in 2010.

 

These are called menko and are part of a Japanese card game. Over time, baseball subjects became collectible as cards and were then produced with a game in mind. The types of baseball menko range from the outlandishly cartoonish to rather detailed portraits. What they all have in common is the wonderful black line work and bold color blocks.

As I wrote yesterday when discussing the Joe Medwick card, I believe the 1934-36 Diamond Stars are the most beautiful set of cards ever produced.

 

The colors, poses, and backgrounds all work together to make these cards a joy to look at. As for its influence, there are two things you can see in my own work.

The first are the colors. When I started making my card drawings, I developed a color palette I wanted to use consistently across all the cards. The Art Deco blues, yellows, reds, and tans can all be seen over the hundreds of cards I have done.

The second was that the Diamond Stars have been influential in the little scenes that are going on behind many of the players.

 

Look at the lounging ballplayers in the close-up of the George Selkirk card or the two fellas milling around the batting cage behind Earl Grace. They help make the cards more interesting and fun. When space permits, I like to add my own little scenes in the backgrounds of my cards.

And it isn’t just cards that have influenced my work; I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about what the cards came in:

 

Who doesn’t remember the joy of picking out a pack of cards from the display box? Was there anything better than tearing open the back, getting that whiff of sugary faux-gum, and hoping more than anything that the card you really needed was in the stack you were about to tear through?

In some ways, I like the wrappers better than the cards themselves. I appreciate the limitations of the printing process used for these things, with only a few colors allowed and intricate detail almost impossible. Yet the designer was challenged to create an attractive package that would yank a kid’s attention away from all the other shiny, colorful distractions in a store and make them plunk down their money for a pack of cards.

Maybe it is the mystery an unopened pack of cards holds that is attractive – you don’t know what is inside until you pay for it and rip it open. Opened, the mystery is gone. Unopened, your hope remains alive a little longer, with the possibility that the one card you really want is right there inside.

When I make some of my cards, I like to create my own wrapper and sometimes even the whole display box. It brings me back to being a kid again, reliving the mystery of what could be in the pack I just bought.

 

And last but certainly not least, this artist has influenced not only my own work, but pretty much every baseball artist since the 1980s:

 

Dick Perez burst onto the baseball card scene with his groundbreaking Hall of Fame postcard sets beginning in 1980. These cards were completely unlike anything out there at the time, and I remember seeing them not long after the first set came out. Then came his “Diamond Kings” series in the 1982 Donruss card set. These were just an incredible departure from the usual photo cards churned out by every manufacturer since the 1950s. Perez’s illustrated cards were the perfect bridge between the early tobacco cards and the modern day. I thought Dick Perez’s cards were perfect, and beyond their aesthetic beauty, they planted the idea in my head that maybe one day I, too, could become a baseball artist.

And the crazy thing is, here I am, decades later, the recipient of the same award Dick Perez received two years ago. Talk about realizing a dream come true.

Thank you to everyone who has supported my work over the years. I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate it. Thank you so very much.

I hope you have enjoyed my series on how I discovered baseball cards, what my favorite cards are, and what my influences have been. I have always been lucky in that the art I create just flows out of me naturally. It is as if I need to do it just as I need to breathe. I never think about the reason why I do what I do, so pausing to reflect on the whys and hows has been quite interesting.

It has also been great reading your comments and emails, sharing your own personal experiences with baseball cards. It is fascinating to realize how much these little pieces of colored cardboard affected so many of us in such a positive way.

If you’d like to see how I go about creating my drawings and stories, I did a multi-part series HERE.

You can read the official 2026 Burdick Award story HERE.

And you can view and read all of my other work HERE.