Recently, while getting something notarized, I commented on the notary’s impressive rubber stamp and even more impressive embosser. I told her that I had a project involving rubber stamps and it brought me down memory lane to one of my favorite projects from 2009: Topps Star Wars Artist Sketch Cards.

Topps, the maker of baseball cards, is also in the Star Wars business . They gave out cards to artists to customize, which were later sold with deluxe sized sets of trading cards. The collectable cards then get traded on Ebay, as these have for the last decade and a half. (Here’s one of mine. Also don’t ask about the artist name, I didn’t make it up.)

At one of the group shows for this series, I met one of the collectors of my card series. He was an art school teacher and really loved the colors and the textures of the cards. He also kindly told my parents about how all things that you see around you were conceived and thought about by an artist first. My parents were still on the fence about my career choice and his words was the first notch of many that began to change their mind.

The cards were initially primed with spray paint, then inked with multiple layers of lighter colored high quality Japanese ink by putting the card directly onto the inkpad. (By the way, that’s like dipping the canvas directly into the paint, but ok.) Then I’d finish by dipping the Vader rubber stamp into the matte black ink pad. I found the result to be much nicer if only one side of the stamp was dipped because it created a very dramatic gradient effect across Vader’s face. The card would end up very over-inked which created this fantastic texture, but somehow the low res photographs from 2009 fail to capture it.

The Darth Vader rubber stamp was made the old fashioned way with an initial pencil sketch and then carved with a rubber stamp kit that included U & V shaped cutters. I learned all these skills in my 6th grade graphics arts class. Shout out to Mr. Ericsson!

And if you’re still wondering about the artist handle that I used to use, it was from the mind of this supervillain.