Bernie as a Garbage Pail Kid; the art behind Bernventures!

What’s up, Hive? After a grueling few days, I’m able to sit in front of the computer with a somewhat clear head. Leading up to this moment, it’s been 72 hours of madness. Like the rest of the internet, I sat laughing at the endless firehose of Bernie memes, sitting amongst the Fellowship of Lord of the Rings, tapping out an MMA fighter with an arm bar. It was around that time I got a call from @robrigo asking how fast I could turn a Bernie in mittens Garbage Pail Kid for Topps.

Little known to the WAX and NFT community, along with my friend @swarddraws, a brilliant colorist and illustrator, we at @eos.detroit have collaborated with Topps previously on Garbage Pail Kids. We did five custom cards reimagining characters from Original Series 2. Unfortunately, there was a bottle neck somewhere after we handed off the art and they didn’t make it in the OS2 release. With that experience under our belt, I called @swarddraws to see if he could clear his schedule for 24 hour turnaround.

Once @swarddraws confirmed, we got started. I started with preliminary sketches of a cantankerous Bernie, and it wasn’t long before I realized just how challenging this art would be. Firstly, let me tell you from experience, GPK’s are one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to draw. Firstly, I’m not a cartoonist. I’m a comic book illustrator, and my typical style is much more akin to that of the art I’ve done for Cryptowriter and the Finey saga. GPK’s are something that you either nail, or completely miss. When you miss, it just looks like fan art or a poorly done impression of a GPK.

What’s more, most of the signature GPK look comes from the eyes, nose and mouth. Two of those three features in this rendition, would be covered by a mask. I sent my initial sketch to Adam. He did a great job, but it wasn’t entirely GPK, or entirely Bernie. An additional obstacle was that Bernie is old, and GPK’s look like babies. There are a few elderly GPK’s, such as Rockin’ Robert and Wrinkled Rita, but when I tried aging Bernie, it just didn’t look right. Even though the real Bernie is old, he doesn’t look wrinkly.

As a backdrop to me and @swarddraws refining the art, the @eos.detroit dev team was pulling off a monumental task of building a site that interfaced with Atomic that would issue rarities, implement pack opening and even a leaderboard to rank cards burned for a chance to win golden mittens in February. Our task as artists was compounded when we were asked to turn out multiple variations of Bernie in different scenarios.

One silver lining to the pressure was getting approval from Topps to incorporate Mars Attacks, a property they do have licensing rights for. This was the adrenaline rush @swarddraws and I need as we’re both enormous fans of the franchise. It’s no surprise that’s my favorite piece of the whole NFT set release. In the end, the set has several variants including sketchies, raw art without the GPK branding, and legendary artist signature series, which are the most rare, and I’ll confirm I do not have myself […which is a little weird, lol].

The Garbage Pail Kids Bernventures NFT release is live now at https://gpkbernventures.com and only available until January 31st at midnight. Working with @eos.detroit and Topps has been a career milestone for me, and as many of you know, as much as I love photography, this is the space I’ve wanted to be in my entire life. Having the opportunity to create art for these developing blockchains and projects is the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. If you picked up some of the Bernventures cards, let me know what you thought in the comments!