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Sports Casualties Collector Cards

4/26/2023

Sports Casualties is a series of illustrated collector cards I made in college. The class featured different visiting faculty. These instructors would visit for four classes and have the students do an assignment that was similar to the instructor's style or real-life commissions.

The assignment was to create four sports themed posters. We had no choice of sports. Cricket, Polo, Tennis, and Golf. Ah, the sports of the elite. Everyone can relate. I was less than thrilled to do this, but I had to find a way to turn it into something I would enjoy. I knew everyone would be doing super-realistic watercolors and beautifully rendered ink drawings since that was the style of the instructor. Maybe that was the point? I'm not really sure. In any case, I was willing to be the fool and show up with something out of left field (pun intended). I felt... no... I KNEW it was my obligation to to do something totally freaky.

I was, and still am, a huge fan of Wacky Packages by Topps and had collected them for many years. Pretty much anything Topps is cool in my book. Around this time, Topps' Garbage Pail Kids were really big and there were lots of gross-out stuff on the store shelves: booger candy, slime... so why not do something that mom will hate?

These were conceived and painted very quickly as I never intended to do anything with them beyond this class. I can't recall what grade I received, probably a "B", but I do remember the critique was very brief. The visiting professor said something along the lines of, "Ha, ha. Now here we have something very different. Perhaps some more of this, some less of that. Interesting"–YES! INTERESTING!

They're exceptionally strange, almost Dali-esque. As crazy and violent as they are, I tried to keep them funny. I'm sure that's debatable, but I'll defend it.