Giving credit to other notable card artists

As a creator, it's important to give credit and attention to fellow artists and creators who inspired me to begin painting baseball cards. I only came to the art form in 2020, after thinking about how card design draws on trends going on in the broader world of art and design. This gave me the idea to start creating my own art, but I couldn't have approached it without some other card artists who showed me that it's possible to take something old, like a baseball card dating from last year, or from more than fifty years ago, and create something new from it. These are some of the artists who inspired me to start creating card art during time of COVID:

Tony Gwynn, 1989 Topps, by Isaac Coronado.

Isaac Coronado (@OptimusVolts on Twitter) is a California-based artist who, among larger format canvases and sculptures, builds Dio de los Muertos imagery onto modern day baseball cards. As
he describes his origins, "(A)t the moment of his birth, a Transformer disguised as a Mack truck was in a three-way collision with Mickey Mouse and a bus full of graffiti artists. The resulting explosion created an unstable art field that was absorbed by the newborn." Thus far, no one has confirmed this creation story, but his images are unusual, multicultural, and vibrant. I love how he incorporates the predominant colors in the card and on the player's uniform into the designs he creates, like in this example of a Tony Gwynn card. He also has created some impressive and unusual abstract paintings that look like what would happen if Jackson Pollock stumbled into a hobby shop.

One of my first exposures to card art was through a discussion about modern baseball cards at a meeting of SABR's Baseball Card Research Committee, where I met a few members and started

Hank Aaron, by Jason Schwartz.

on this journey. The committee chair is Jason Schwartz (@HeavyJ28), who deconstructs cards and rebuilds them using colorful, sparkling backgrounds. The impact is a weightier, modern, and elegant reinterpretation of vintage cards. He has used his card art to raise funding for notable foundations (in the names of Buck Leonard, Dave Parker, Jackie Robinson, Josh Gibson, and Kirk Gibson) and causes like the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum. Jason's card at the left is an elegant memorial to Hank Aaron, using the border of one of the Gowdy cards from the early 20th century with an image of Aaron in his Braves uniform from around the time that he hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth's record.

The SABR Baseball Card Research Committee page (@SABRbbcards) is also worth checking out to learn about specific sets and themes related to baseball cards, and you can also go to www.sabr.org to learn about the Society for American Baseball Research.

Matthew Burke (@Alloystang) adds purple heart wood frames to cards to create a special collectible. He is raising money for the Alzheimer's Foundation by auctioning off these cards on

Rickey Henderson, 1987 Topps, by Matthew Burke.

his Twitter feed, so give him a follow and check out his work. He spends most of his time designing and building interiors, so he knows a few things about creating things out of beautiful materials.

Rickey Henderson was one of my favorite players of the 1980s, along with Cal Ripken and Don Mattingly. I loved his brashness and quotability, his stealth batting stance, and his speed. This card, at the right, is almost like a miniature memorial to his playing career.

Finally, Scott Hodges (at www.popartredux.com and @IamScottHodges) considers himself to be a pop artist, but more so he creates masterful reinterpretations of cards that mix eras, years, and players to create images that are truly special. His new card art website (accessible via the link

Ozzie Smith, design by Scott Hodges.

above) is laid out to look like a pack of cards, with each card in the pack viewable using a checklist like the ones one might remember from packs of cards that were enclosed with a stick of actual bubble gum. 

I have vivid memories of Ozzie Smith from the mid-1980s, especially the somersault and backflip that he would do during player introductions. Scott's interpretation is very special to me, down to the Emerald City, rainbow, and poppy fields that recall his nickname, the Wizard of Oz.

(Author's note: I just ordered a pack of cards from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which still had the gum in them that had essentially petrified.)

These are only a few examples of card artists whom I've encountered so far during my time painting vintage baseball cards, so please comment below if you have others to suggest, or if you are one of them. I'll hope to add to this list, and of course will be continuously updating and upgrading my own card galleries on these pages.

Meanwhile, happily, while this week the Northeast seems to be mired in slush and snow, the happy news that spring training starts this week brings hope, as it always does, but even more so in this particular season when we are all awaiting the availability of vaccine and the re-opening of things that we love so much, not just baseball.