Holidays and blog anniversaries come and go with little mention from me, but there’s something about the odometer rolling over that makes me want to do something special!
Something like…
…uhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmm…
…like…
…like…
Oh, bloody hell.
What can I do that’s special?
Wait a minute… there is something I can share that’s truly one of a kind…
Back when I was a kid, I wanted to be the guy who worked for Topps and painted the new caps on guys who had been traded. I loved baseball cards, I had a modicum of artistic talent, what better way to put those together into a career?
At some point I decided to give it a try myself… Only I didn’t have any idea of what they used to do this. I went ahead and used what I had at hand: The paint brushes and Testors paint we used for painting our model cars. My canvas would be some doubles I had laying around.
The results were… Interesting.
Bill Robinson got traded from the Phillies to the Pirates before the 1975 season; I don’t know if my artwork was necessarily done before there were any other cards that showed Bill Robinson as a Pirate, but I certainly gave it a try. It’s a shame that the scan doesn’t do justice to my (*ahem*) interesting brushwork.
Some months before Robinson moved to Pittsburgh, a Chicago Legend got traded to the A’s. Again, I made an attempt to update a card I had.
The card already came with a yellow background, so maybe I shouldn’t have given him a yellow jersey… But I will point out that I sweated the details on this one and painted in Williams’ stirrups and sleeves.
This next card is kind of sloppy, but it shows that I wasn’t afraid to go rogue…
I clearly wanted to practice painting a guy into a yellow-paneled Brewers cap (which I always liked for some reason), but the thing is that Ed Halicki never pitched for the Brewers. Maybe I had to make do with the cards I had on hand.
This next cards is fairly easy to put a date to… Manny Sanguillen was sent from the Bucs to the A’s in November, 1976, and then back to the Pirates in April, 1978. This next card was clearly made in between those two dates:
My updating Joe Rudi into a Angels uniform is one of the worst attempts I made, but I give myself bonus points for painting the whole jersey white and trying to do the numbers.
This is another card that was probably attempted in 1977 (Rudi’s first year with the Angels). In case you’re wondering what the deal is with that weird marking which runs from his face into the corner of the photo… that’s a printing flaw, and most likely the reason why I chose this card for my experimentation.
The last card I’m going to share with you is one where I’m not sure what I was doing… Maybe just cleaning excess paint off my brush. It made me laugh, though…
It shows that my dislike for Reggie Jackson clearly goes back many years.
So there we have it, post # 1000. I still enjoy the blogosphere, I’ve got hundreds of scanned images and many, many pages of blogging ideas, so I promise you I’m not going anywhere anytime soon… not unless all of you leave first, and then it all becomes fairly pointless. It sounds trite, but it’s all of you who keep this fun for me, and I appreciate all the feedback I’ve received over the past 3+ years.
The Shlabotnik Report 