Again, interesting theory, but David Saunders has stated that Norm painted all the die cuts. He has stated that definitively several times, so unless he adds a note of uncertainty, I will assume Norm painted everything in Series 1.
Well, I wrote to David to double check as my recollection matched Tom's and sure enough, Tom is correct, Norm did NOT paint 100% of all diecut titles. Tom is wrong on Fink, it appears Norm is responsible for the odd pinkie.
This is the direct quote from David:
"The pinky is no more out-of-proportion that the nose, chin and ears of the little man. He is a painted cartoon charcater, so Norman Saunders was rendering a fellow with exaggerated features. The same style of rendered cartoon characters was used in most of the Nutty Awards. The can has a metallic rim that was painted by the same air-brush artist on the Topps staff that did the bottle for Boredoms. His assignment was to fill in as much of the finished product as he could, so that Topps would only need to pay their “free-lance artist” (Norman Saunders) for the least amount of work. This approach was later abandoned after the first set of stickers.
...they wanted to use their staff artists to produce as much of the final painting as they could and then only need to pay Norman Saunders for painting the lettering and the characters. This approach was later abandoned by Topps".
My comment:
The last sentence refers to Norm doing much of of the painting for each title as the series went on and that is clearly visible in the quality of the art as the middle series and later series are far more superior than the diecuts.