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Heavy J Studios |
Sunday, July, 16, 2023
So many crazy and unexpected things have happened since I began making these cards, but I have to say waking up to a note from a future Hall of Famer to see if I could do a piece for PNC Park would have to rate extremely high on the list. The only problem was I couldn’t do it.
Or could I? 
Heavy J Studios collectors know my typical pieces are 3-1/2″ tall, that is, the size of a standard baseball card, and follow a simple formula: cut up a card, glue it onto glitter paper. Here, however, the ask was for something nearly 5 feet tall. Add to the challenge the fact that an eye problem heading for surgery meant cutting with any level of precision or detail was an impossibility. Still, there is only one right answer when the chance of a lifetime comes along. I was in.
The series I would be a part of was a celebration of great moments in Pirates history through art. As I took in the lengthy list of choices, which included Clemente, Wagner, Stargell, and so many other Pirates greats, one called my name more than the others: Rennie Stennett’s 7 for 7 game in 1975.
There were a few reasons for choosing Rennie. First off, I’m a sucker for “famous feats.” Second, I saw an opportunity to honor a player whose memory might otherwise be lost to time, at least among the team’s younger or less die-hard fans. And finally, Rennie’s 1976 Topps Record Breaker card was a special one to me. As a kid who started collecting in 1978, it was one of my first “old cards” and one of the prizes of my collection. So Rennie it was! Now all I needed was a five-foot tall version of the card to cut up and the world’s biggest sheet of glitter paper!
Or a brand new approach I’d never tried before: Heavy J Studios Series XXL.
Influenced by “card art” legends Tim Carroll and Pixel Hall of Fame, my idea was to create the piece not from a dozen or so large elements (e.g., the red “record breaker” shield) but from hundreds if not thousands of smaller elements. How many? I wasn’t sure.
Here was my initial design, and it’s okay to say it. It was terrible, even breaking the card’s main image into more than 1200 individual pixels. Ouch! I’d either have the ugliest piece on the concourse, or I’d need a lot more pixels!
How many more? How about 6,000 or so!
If you examine the design closely, you might notice a letter or number on each pixel. These corresponded to the 20 different colors of glitter paper I’d selected for the project. Now I had a plan. All I needed was a couple hundred hours to make it happen!
I wish I could say this was the kind of work where every square I cut and glued made the project look cooler and cooler, that there was immediate gratification in the process. On the contrary, the project was one of faith and discipline. While I worked, this was my typical view: some tiny non-descript section of the piece that looked like nothing in particular, much less Rennie Stennett.
Series XXL is evidently a marathon, not a sprint, and it often took getting up and walking away to notice that anything good was coming from all my hours of cutting and gluing. And then one day I got up because there were no more squares to glue!
I can’t wait to visit PNC next month to see it up on the concourse, along with all the other awesome artwork in the series.
Next up for Heavy J Studios XXL? You really know your 1978 Topps if you can guess it from the pic!
