There’s a popular phrase used throughout The Hobby: collect what you love. When it comes to sports cards, however, veteran collectors will tell you that there are three key factors that go into a grail: scarcity, autographs, and the players themselves. However, for some collectors, there’s a fourth criteria that’s equally, if not more, important: the card’s design. That’s where artists like Pixel Hall of Fame come in.
For me, the connection to Pixel Hall of Fame goes back a few years. In 2021, I won a giveaway for a Rally Rd. x Pixel Hall of Fame contest and pulled the ultimate chase card: a 1-of-1 featuring a cut Honus Wagner signature. Recently, that hit came full circle when I sold the card back to its creator. Closing the loop on that grail card sparked a broader conversation about retro art, custom card design, and the inspiration behind his work—which ultimately led to this interview.
Since 2016, the now-Chicago-based artist has been creating custom-designed cards with a decidedly retro feel. The pixelated artwork is less AAA gaming studio and more Pac-Man, harkening back to a time when ripping was about more than 1/1s—and the descriptions on the back of cards weren’t written by AI.
Mantel caught up with the prolific artist, covering his career, his NBA collaborations, and what’s next.
When did you first start making art, and what were some of your earliest works?
I’ve been making art from the time I could pick up a pencil. As a kid I was always drawing my favorite subjects, which ranged from Batman, Superman, Jaws, and my favorite athletes. I was born in Los Angeles in the early 80s, and so my favorite athletes at that age were Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson. They were probably my first sports related subjects, and I still have some of those early drawings somewhere.
At what point did you know that art/design was going to be your career?
Like many young kids, plan A was to become a professional baseball player. Unfortunately for me, my prospects for playing past high school were pretty low, and I realized then and there that this was my last stop on the baseball train (though I do play in a casual beer league today as a 43 year old). That’s probably the moment I knew I was going to have to go to resort to plan B and become a creative professional.
Every artist has their own style. How did you land on 8-bit and 16-bit designs?
I grew up on a healthy diet of NES, Game Boy, Super Nintendo, Genesis, and N64. So that seed of nostalgia had been planted long ago. I was also always goofing around on the computer, making drawings in Microsoft Paint, and later Photoshop (my first copy was Photoshop 3). In MS Paint, there was a zoom feature, and doing so allowed you to see the pixel grid. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was basically making pixel art as a young kid.
But it wasn’t until adulthood, specifically around 2015 when I deliberately made my first “official” pixel art, which was done for a slideshow for my beer league’s end of the year banquet. In May of 2016, working professionally as a digital product designer (basically UI/UX design), I decided to start a side project exploring pixel animations of my favorite athletes and called it Pixel Hall of Fame. My first attempt was of my favorite childhood athlete, Ken Griffey Jr, and his iconic swing, and the project was underway.
How did you wind up collaborating with the Boston Celtics, San Antonio Spurs, Nike basketball, ASICS, Fortnite, and ESPN? How do those kinds of projects come together, and how did they change the trajectory of your career?
I was lucky enough to build a modest following on Instagram and other social media around my early pixel animations, and a lot of opportunities came my way from that. My sense of things was that there were a lot of pixel artists making amazing pixel art at that time (2016 or so), but there wasn’t really anyone approaching it with sports as a focus (or at least not very many). This was largely an untapped area of nostalgia given how large 8-bit and 16-bit sports video games loomed in the memories of certain people my age. I think I was just ahead of the curve a little bit here, and was making quality work, so all these brands started reaching out and approaching me with opportunities.
The first of which was Nike Basketball who wanted me to make an 8-bit animation of Lebron James’s block and Kyrie Irving’s 3-pointer from game 7 of the 2017 NBA Finals (Lebron and Kyrie even retweeted my work!). This project established me as a professional that brands could count on to make quality work and things kind of took off quickly from there. Others approached me and I took as many opportunities as I was able to, given my bandwidth.
I think the lesson here is that if you make unique, quality work, and have a bit of a following, brands will notice.
What/who is your dream collaboration?
In the past, Topps had featured artists more prominently in some of their releases like Project 2020, which was one of the original inspirations for me to start making my own card art. I don’t think they’re doing this much anymore (if at all), but if they ever bring something like this back, I’d make a big push to be a part of it.
It would also be amazing to one day do an official collab with Ken Griffey Jr., and produce an official set of autographed card designs. He was my childhood hero, and I collected his baseball cards growing up. I still have them and still collect his cards today, so an official collab with him would be a full circle moment.
Other collabs I would love to work on are with any of my favorite Chicago sports teams. I’m a huge White Sox, Bulls, Bears, and Blackhawks fan. While I’m a Sox fan, I’m not a Cubs hater, so that would be incredible too. And recently I went to my first Chicago Sky game, and it was a blast, so a collab with them would be really fun.
What’s the difference in approach between working with a team, a brand, and an athlete?
I approach all of these the same way initially. The first thing to do is understand the constraints, whether they have a specific concept in mind, or if they want me to explore ideas on my own. And in all cases, there is a lot of back and forth just honing in on what the final product will be through sketching and storyboarding. This kind of planning is crucial for pixel art, because it’s an incredibly tedious process the way I do it. I don’t use any AI or automation to produce my work, and I execute every image, and every frame of every animation by hand, pixel by pixel in Photoshop. So the idea has to be relatively crystalized before I embark on the final pixel art.
Having done official collabs with both the Boston Celtics and the San Antonio Spurs, I can say each team has their own unique dynamic in the way they like to work on creative projects. The Celtics reached out to me to produce animations for their first ever NFT collection, and they had a fairly specific idea of what they were looking for. I was working with their creative team, so there were multiple people involved in an already established vision. The Spurs, on the other hand, I was working with an individual creative director in the organization who had a loose concept in mind for Tony Parker’s jersey retirement celebration, but let me explore and propose some of my own ideas before landing on the final animation.
It’s similar for brands. It’s often a back and forth before we land on the final product. I’ve done a couple projects for Nike, and both times were a little different because I was working with different parts of the business: the Nike Basketball social team in one case, and the Nike youth apparel division for the other. Most recently I did a longer animation for Lionsgate, as part of their artist collabs leading up to the release of John Wick 4, and worked through an agency who gave me a lot of creative freedom. I provided direction for the entire storyboard, concept sketches, and final animation, while working with the agency to understand what Lionsgate would or wouldn’t sign off on.
In my experience, working with athletes can really just depend on a myriad of factors. There are often several opinions to navigate between the athlete themselves, and their agent or team. They can often have specific guardrails around what you can and can’t do, what they’re interested in or not, and so you really have to work through all that first.
Your name speaks to the digital aspect of your work, from the pixelated style to your digital pieces, but your work has also been featured in galleries across the globe. How did those experiences come together, and what did they mean to you?
I have a fine art background, and studied drawing, painting, sculpture, and art history in college, and I’ve always been interested in showing in gallery spaces. So when opportunities to display my pixel art would come up, I jumped on those.
In 2017, I was lucky enough to exhibit my pixel art at Naughton Gallery at Queens University in Belfast. The curator reached out to me to see if I was interested in showing work in a sports themed group exhibition, and the lineup was truly incredible, and included some legendary artists like Paul Pfeiffer and Robert Crumb. It would be an understatement to say I was honored to have my pixel animations displayed alongside work by these titans.
Pixel Hall of Fame isn’t your day job. How has all of this side work inspired your professional career?
Yes, by day I’m a digital product designer (UI/UX design) for a larger technology company. While pixel art isn’t my day job, it has certainly given me an attention to detail that helps me in my day to day work. In pixel art, you have to care about every single pixel, because one stray pixel can really change the complexion of a form, a color, or a piece overall. I can safely say that making pixel art has allowed me to bring this same rigor to my product design practice.
What’s next?
The last couple years have been slower because I’ve been raising two young, wonderful boys. This is a full time job on its own, so I’ve taken a little break from doing pixel art professionally. That being said, I have a few ideas cooking that I’m eager to bring to fruition.
One that I’m particularly excited about, and making plans for, is a custom trading card project involving my own IP. I’m still exploring and crafting this universe, but I’ll likely be leaning into monsters and sci-fi as themes. There will likely be a sports overlap in there somewhere, but my goal is to create a unique universe, with unique characters, and use physical trading cards as the delivery vehicle. It will be a smaller print run, and I’m not sure if I’ll make all the cards by hand like I do with my custom refractors, but I’m sure I’ll at least sprinkle in a few handmade 1-of-1s in there. Ultimately, I want it to be whimsical and fun, but with some collectibility built in.
