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UFC's Brittney Palmer paints baseball cards as part of Topps' anniversary
Brittney Palmer once appeared on a Topps trading card when the company did a set featuring UFC fighters and personnel. Now, she is using her artistic abilities to create some as part of a Tribute for Topps’ 70th anniversary.
Palmer and her boyfriend, artist Gregory Siff, are each producing 18 cards for Topps as part of its anniversary campaign called Project 70.
Each limited edition card will be available for 70 hours after its release and then never again.
A UFC Octagon girl, Palmer’s debut card was of former New York Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez. The artists who are part of the program pick from popular card layouts of the past and then paint the players in their own images.
Among the players Palmer painted are Rodriguez, Hall of Famers Babe Ruth and Jim Palmer, World Series hero Mookie Betts of the Los Angeles Dodgers and budding San Diego Padres superstar Fernando Tatis Jr.
Siff, who participated in a project for Topps last year, painted New York Mets’ star Darryl Strawberry as one of his 18 players.
Palmer said Topps reached out to Siff to ask if she would be interested. She said she was thrilled to have the opportunity. She is one of only three women among the 51 artists who are involved in the project.
“I love painting, I love commission work and I love creating shows, but doing this kind of thing, I really, really like it,” she said. “I got to be a lot smaller in terms of canvases and I got to be as wild as I wanted.”
It was something of a challenge for Palmer to paint Rodriguez, who has been photographed so much since he came into the public consciousness as an 18-year-old who was the first overall pick by the Seattle Mariners in the 1993 MLB draft.
She relished the challenge, even though she knew she could face criticism from hardcore fans.
“It’s a give-and-take,” she said of the challenges of painting such an iconic athlete. “What I wanted to do is that I wanted to come out with something different with these cards. We know these portraits that I can do. And I’m going to do those and incorporate those, but I really wanted to show a different side of me. So I decided on my first card out to go with such a well-known athlete and go completely opposite of what people would expect me to do.
“I also painted his portrait in my normal style, just as a back-up and as a bonus because it’s such an important card and it’s the first drop. There was a little bit of pressure and a piece of me was doubting myself in the beginning. Sports fans are diehards. As an artist, I’m so used to the feeling of ‘Will they like it? I hope they like it? Please like it.' But when you feel that way, I just stick to my guns and do it in my vision and say, ‘[Expletive] it,’ and do it the way I felt best. That usually works out well for me.”
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