Artist Brings Unique Style to Insert Set
Tom Whalen is inspired by vintage graphic design as an artist.
When Whalen sits at his computer to generate digital masterpieces, he becomes one with Adobe Illustrator. Whalen works wonders with colors, shapes, and extruded action lines to enhance any project.
Known for his ability to produce top-notch screen-printed movie posters for major film companies, Whalen was brought in to add a little flair and pizzazz to 2024 Bowman Chrome Baseball.
Whalen designed the 25-player insert set, Bowman Ascensions, to bring the cards to life with his unique style.
“I’m a big fan of incorporating type, image, and graphics together into one kind of cohesive melting pot, so to speak,” Whalen said. “I consider it like pop art. And that’s what I wanted to do with this series was to infuse my poster design aesthetics onto baseball cards. To me, this feels very me. I’m very thankful that my vision was allowed to be so clearly shown in these cards.”
Topps Brand Manager Coby Kerr feels like the cards in this year’s Ascensions product really come to life. Whalen gave the 2024 version a retro touch.
“This is the third year we’re doing Ascensions in Bowman Chrome,” Kerr said. “Year after year, we just switch out the artists — it was Jeremy Fish last year. So, I wanted to look for somebody new for this set. I saw Tom’s art, and he’s done stuff with Disney and all these big companies. His art just popped, and I thought it would look great on a baseball card.”
The bright colors indeed come right at you. Once Whalen got rolling on designing the cards, he settled in on a formula.
“I dropped the player in first — because there are some great poses and great photos that were supplied — and then I let that dictate where everything else would fall,” Whalen said. “Once I got that, I would put the name where it made sense. I always want to keep the image itself really front and center but play with a lot of motion and color around the player. It almost looks like they’re in a Lava Lamp of activity.”
The Ascensions checklist is stacked with 25 of the top rookies and prospects in the game. Guys like Elly De La Cruz, Jackson Chourio, and Wyatt Langford are getting established at the MLB level, while players such as Jasson Dominguez, Walker Jenkins, Max Clark, and Arjun Nimmala have the makings of future stars.
“Leo De Vries, he’s going to be a huge chase in this product as the number one international guy,” Kerr said. “Roman Anthony’s in this. He’s a step away from being the number one prospect in all of baseball. It’s a very good list.”
From Movie Posters to Cards
For the past 15 years, Whalen has made a living by producing screen-printed movie posters.
“A company will go to, say, Lucas Films or Disney, get the licensing to do some classic movies, and then hire me to basically reinterpret those movies in my style,” Whalen said.
Recently, Whalen produced the official movie poster for The Lion King‘s 30th anniversary. He has also designed posters for Star Wars, Ratatouille, and other popular Disney flicks. Whalen even designed an attraction poster that’s permanently hanging in the park at Disneyland.
Over the summer, he designed Hasbro’s booth for the San Diego Comic-Con. Whalen really enjoys seeing his work in public. Over the past couple of years, he has been the lead artist for some Hasbro Power Rangers toys and GI Joe packaging.
“It’s fun to go into comic and toy shops and see those boxes that I did as the official artwork for those toys,” Whalen said. “It’s pretty surreal, and it’s something I don’t ever want to take for granted.”
To add designing baseball cards for Topps to his repertoire is a dream come true.
“It’s a bucket list thing for me to do trading cards,” said Whalen, who collected cards as a kid. “It was a super fun project.”
The project provided different obstacles — good and bad — for Whalen as an artist.
“It was very freeing to work on such a small canvas, where I’m used to working on 24-by-36-inch posters,” Whalen said. “This was so much fun to get a lot of action on a 2 ½ by 3 ½ canvas. Knowing you can hold the whole thing in your hand was a neat challenge for me to work in that space.”
The Chase is On
The Ascensions product will be a fun chase card for collections. Each of the 25 players has numbered parallels, with refractors ranging from Gold /50 to Orange /25, Red /5, and Superfractor 1/1.
Whalen is hoping collectors enjoy his interpretation of the game’s up-and-coming talent.
“This is a little outside the box of what cards I have seen look like, so I hope it stands out as something a little bit different in the collecting community,” Whalen said. “They should stand out against a lot of the other stuff. I hope my style bled through from what I normally work on into this, and people respond to it.”
