UnderGround Forum >> my Topps UFC Bloodlines sketch card drawings

check back to see more. I'll get caught up tonight with all they've posted so far, and then post the rest once Topps does

Ryan Black -  OUTSTANDING work as usual, bro! Would love to own a massive, 4x8' print of the Sonnen/Silva one.

it would make it look like the original atari 64 graphics to blow it up that big!

Arachnoid - It's fun to see how much your work has progressed over the years! Good job man!

thank you...and I agree! I've gone through different stages and transformations. I think I will get back to some of the stuff I used to do at some point still (ie, melted crayon, for one)

damnit, I keep resizing these to be smaller and they keep automatically making them larger anyway. I'm just gonna skip resizing them from now on. lol

whadafykumeanitstaken - Congatulations! Amazing that you got picked up by Topps. Have you done card art before? Some of these are awesome.

Thank you. I had done card art before, but had no idea that 'sketch cards' existed as part of a trading card set. I had done a number of MMA trading card sized drawings on my own, just for fun. But I had sort of hit a point where I was gonna focus on larger drawings when the Topps opportunity came about. Finding out that there are sketch cards in lots of trading card sets, and seeing other artists' work really inspired me and gave me confidence that I could continue to improve working at that size. I picked up copic markers which I had never used before.

If you look at my sketch cards page: http://www.bradutterstrom.com/mma-sketch-cards.html , the bottom 4 or 5 rows are the ones I did long before this Topps opportunity came about. And then when I learned of it and got some copics, the top 3 rows (as well as some of my GoT cards) are what I was doing to get used to my copics and try out some different looks and techniques.

When Topps first contacted me about my art, I was assuming that we were talking about base cards or a subset...that they'd want to use my existing larger works or maybe have me do some new works, and then shrink them down to a trading card. Finding out that they wanted 100+ NEW original drawings to go straight into packs was extremely overwhelming and challenging! But I just jumped into it heard first, and pretty soon got into a rhythm where I was doing several a day on my days off. This has definitely been the most exciting, challenging, defining project I've worked on to this point. But I definitely have a newfound confidence in terms of what I think I am capable of with sketch cards.

Thanks Jacob...think the above post answered most of your questions...but also Topps had posted on twitter that they were thinking about using original artwork in a future set awhile back, and asked who people would like to see do it. I contacted them and told them I was interested, but I think a lot of kind folks also said they'd appreciate seeing my work in a Topps set and soon they contacted me about it.