Collect ‘Em All!
An ongoing series of “Trading Cards” to give my bizarre characters a proper stage and present each of them in a short and crisp way, including all their strengths and weaknesses.
Drawing and inventing stories often leads to numerous great bizarre characters, which however haven’t been given a really worthy stage until now.
As a 90’s kid I was inspired by the idea and aesthetic of all these cards I collected back then. So I decided to create my own burlesque, collectible Trading Cards, in which everyday-, personal- and situation-based topics as well as social criticism are treated in an exaggerated and humorous way. But also senseless clamoring as well as numerous references to pop culture are often to be found.
Every Trading Card presents a unique character with a little story about his or her life. “Nokoela the carnivorous cow” might be my oldest creation here; I invented her when I was 12 years old. Other characters came to life within university projects, while most of these figures have their origin in the huge amount of smear pages full of splashes of colour that remain after intensive drawing. Most of the time, however, they end up in the trash, even though they carry boundless potential for new bizarre worlds with countless figures. This way I found a sustainable way to recycle all of my old “color-bibs” in a unique way.
Shortly after I posted the first cards on Instagram, I got a request from “It’s Nice That”, one of the biggest platforms championing creativity worldwide, who loved the trading cards and wanted to feature them on their site. They interviewed me as well, you can read the respective article here:
As a result, the cards and especially the characters became more and more popular; I started producing and selling the cards by myself to almost every country in the world. One package contains 10 random cards. Which will it be? Can you collet ’em all?
Here is a little gallery of some more cards. Click your way through it!
I currently created over 45 cards of the series. The goal is at 94 cards, although there are already a few “Secret Rares”.
