More Masterpieces

  • May 13, 2018

Most of you have received cards or postcards from me that feature my ‘unique’ art skills. Some of you have even responded in-kind, and it’s always a treat to see your talents on display. But I never expected I’d receive anything like these cards my friend JK has sent me these past six months:

That’s a pencil sketch! Santa Claus with my drink of choice (Mt Dew!) done in a classic style. Talent beyond my dreams.

This is a flabbergasting pen sketch of Yossie, based on this photo I had tweeted:

And then recently came this one:

Believe it or not this is a watercolour! A masterpiece created using $2 paints from Walmart and children’s brushes! I had actually bought the paints myself to try painting myself but my scribblings were as nothing compared to this!

Jessica thought I could do better though and I decided to try! I bought new paints ($4 this time) and a new brush ($2) and with a special piece of thick stock paper she provided set out to reproduce this classic:

It took a while, and pushed my abilities to their very limits, but I think I mostly succeeded:

Don’t you?

Jokes aside isn’t Jessica’s talent astonishing? I could only dream of the postcards you’d all be receiving if I even had a tenth of her skills 🙂

Watership Down

  • May 10, 2018

Can you see the family in this photo?

Look in the middle and you can easily see mum and dad:

They’re watching out for their child, a ‘tiny bunny’ who is about as big as a tennis ball and 100 times as cute! S/he’s hiding right at the edge of the lawn near a juniper…

And yes, these photos were taken through our binoculars 🙂

In The Cards

  • May 6, 2018

I found this at Walmart last week:

‘New low price!’ meant $10, and of course I bought it. Twenty packs for that price was a steal, or seemed that way before I knew what it contained…

Here’s the contents:

Interesting mix. 11 different sets, including 4 packs of collectible card game cards. Nothing newer than 10 years, one of set (Anastasia) 24 years old! I’m guessing these have been in a warehouse a long time…

So let’s examine these in detail:

The Power Rangers cards are based on the film and are pretty boring. The plus is that each pack has a foil card, but the minus is that those foils are awful. Each card also has a strange Amerocentric trivia question on the back like this:

Can you get it without decoding the answer?

The X-Men cards have awful art, from the early days of computer-aided colouring. The less said about these the better. But what’s this on the wrapper…?

Each pack has an entry form for a contest to win a baseball card (then) worth $451k! Wikipedia informs me this card was indeed won, sold shortly afterwards for $641k and is now valued at $2.8 million!

The Anastasia cards are pretty normal for an animated film. I got one chase card (cut into an unusual shape as you can see). I’m pretty sure I’ve got packs of these in other boxes like these in the past so I’m guessing they were overprinted and undersold!

The Panda cards are unremarkable, but I got this flashy monkey card that will make a great Xmas gift for Bernard. And I also got this badass tattoo:

Fear the Fur indeed!!

The game cards are mostly garbage – useless cards from unwanted expansions for forgotten games no one played. But I got a rare token (?) from The Simpsons and some crazy gold Power Rangers card so that was good?

I’ve not seen Igor or Despereaux and judging by the cards I don’t want to! They’re uniformly brown for starters, and both seem to have uninteresting and somewhat ugly design. At least I got another chase in my Igor pack – and a Despereaux sticker that will no doubt end up on a postcard 🙂

Which brings me finally to the Space Jam cards. Again I’ve never seen the film, and frankly have always thought it’s probably awful, but take a close look at that card, specifically the bottom right corner…

Yes that’s a scratch-off panel!

My card may be a Grand Prize winner! I may have won a trip to Hollywood! It’s a shame it expired 21.5 years ago… but I’m still interested if I won? Should I scratch it off?

So that’s that! Worth $10 do you think? Or were these better left in the warehouse?