The Infinite Baseball Card Set is a never-ending card set of baseball’s forgotten heroes: Negro League legends, barnstorming mercenaries, semi-pro sluggers, blacklisted bums, foreign phenoms, bush league oddballs, and the famous before they were famous.
The last lines of one of my favorite books, The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna, best describes how I felt about the demise of what should have been a really great project:
“What happened? What the hell happened?” […]
As so often happens, I was on my way to something else when I inadvertently unearthed a pretty interesting fellow who used his baseball talent to not only play professional ball, but see a bit of the world as well. […]
Probably the most difficult part of doing my stories and illustration is the write-up that goes on the back of the card. Despite what you might think, it’s really hard to tell a story in 185 words. I believe the thing that makes what I do different than anyone else is that I write […]
Over the years, many people have remarked about the backgrounds I have in my illustrations. I’m happy people notice them because I go out of my way to make sure they compliment the players. I want them to appear comfortable in the world they inhabit. Sometimes you can see a panoramic view of the […]
Because I’ve been doing my baseball card illustrations for over ten years, I have developed a system of sorts. Back in 2010 when I started, I had to not only do the player drawing themselves, but also come up with the whole design of the “card.” There’s many artists out there who repurpose […]
Back in art school I had a drawing professor that most students hated. It wasn’t because he was a bad teacher – on the contrary, he was terrific. At the time I had my first class with him, he was at the pinnacle of his own career, coming off a couple decades as one […]
With all the reference material assembled – images of Jake, uniform references, personal details – I’m ready to start drawing. Ninety-nine percent of the time I already have a good idea in my head of what I want the player’s pose to be. In Jake’s case, I liked the idea that he was both […]
When it comes time to begin the drawing process, I try to make sure I have all the elements in front of me that I will need to make the illustration as accurate as possible. Like I showed you in the previous installment, I begin with any actual facial images of the player that […]
Once I’ve dug up a good amount of research with which to write my story, I begin a parallel search for good visuals to use for my illustration. If I regularly worked on players like Babe Ruth and Stan Musial, this step would be a breeze, but I tend to gravitate towards the more […]
Armed with the knowledge that I was dealing with a guy playing under two different names, one of which being his given Jewish name, I went back to my library. Fortunately, there has been much written about the history of Jews and baseball. I went for my three go-to volumes: The Big Book of […]