I came across this recently posted unsolicited YouTube review of my book today by Brooklyn caricaturist Elgin “Subway Surfer” Bolling. He has some nice things to say about it. It’s one thing to get positive reviews from general readers, but it’s particularly gratifying to hear from well-established professional caricaturists that, despite long experience doing caricature, they got something from the book as well. Thanks, Elgin!

As always, you can order a copy of The Mad Art of Caricature! here.

Michael Cavna of the Washington Post‘s Comic Riffs blog on cartoons, comics and culture posted his list of the Top 12 Books of 2011 That Made Us Smile… and The Mad Art of Caricature! tops the list! Thanks, Michael!

Q: I’m enthusiastically working through your book. Aside from enjoying the art and fantastic tips, I’m really interested what you said about it taking 500 faces to really get the nuances of caricature / portraiture.

So to fully understand…. maybe naively so, I have set out to draw 500 faces. I really want to at least begin to recognize all the subtleties you mentioned… and to overcome some of the challenges I’ve faced while drawing portraits. A friend of mine said that it takes 1,000 attempts at a particular activity to beome an expert. My goals isn’t really to become an expert (a half expert is fine with me) so much as to further my own art and to help me grow as a hobbyist.

What else would you recommend artists do to grow and become better at achieving a likeness?

A: I think you are mistaking the difference between caricature and likeness. Here is the quote from the book to which this question refers:

The Mad Art of Caricature, Page 12:

In caricature, the old adage of “practice makes perfect” has never been truer. The ability to see doesn’t spring up overnight, and I often tell eager young caricaturists they have about 500 or so bad caricatures in them before they start noticing the subtle things that hide inside the ordinary face.

By the term “see” I am talking about not necessarily the ability to DRAW or to capture a likeness, which can be done without any exaggeration. I am talking about the ability to observe and notice the things about a face that makes it unique—the things that a caricaturist is going to want to exaggerate to create a caricature as opposed to a portrait. The “500 or so bad caricatures” I say a new caricaturist has in them is not about improving drawing skills or capturing a better likeness, it’s about developing your eye to notice those unique things through the simple medium of observing and then drawing what you observe. Of course the act of drawing over 500 caricatures will also improve an artist’s drawing skills as well as their observational skills as it pertains to simply seeing the facial features that a likeness requires be accurately drawn immensely, but it’s the development of the ‘eye’ to which I refer in that quote.

Additionally, those 500 drawings are not a threshold wherein drawing number 501 is like some switch was suddenly switched on and an artist’s drawings suddenly become successful. I actually use that number with my new theme park artists as saying that is about when they stop fighting with the tools and medium, start getting comfortable in the chair and faces start to look different to them as things jump out that previously went unnoticed. It is still an ongoing process, and at the end of the next 500 drawings, number 1,001 will look very different than 501 did as long as they continue to apply themselves.

Now, as to your actual question about what else (besides practice) an artist can do to improve their ability to capture a likeness…

Nothing. There is nothing else besides unyielding dedication and sheer, unrelenting observing/drawing that will help an artist become better at getting a likeness. Studying and incorporating different techniques are important, and can help an artist along the way, but there are no shortcuts. No amount of studying, reading, watching videos, listening to lectures or other sources of information on drawing can replace the act of drawing and what that does to your ability to make your eyes, hand and brain work together. It’s like swimming. You can read about how to swim, you can look at diagrams of the action, you can watch videos and have classroom instruction in swimming. Until you actually get in the water and start moving around, you will never be able to swim.

That is advice nobody really wants to hear, but it is the absolute truth. Talent is only part of the recipe. The most talented artist in the world would not be more than a mediocre artist if they never bothered to work at developing their skills. Modest talent with enormous work ethic and determination will beat out enormously talented but lazy artists every time.

Thanks to Steven White for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

Do you wish your school or local public library carried The Mad Art of Caricature!? So do I! Well, now they can. The Mad Art of Caricature! is officially being distributed for K-12 school libraries through Follett Library Resources and for U.S. Public libraries through their sister company, Book Wholesalers, Inc.

Unfortunately no library will have a book on their shelves they don’t know exists. So, how can you go about getting them to stock a copy? Just ask one of the librarians about getting one through the appropriate resource above. Libraries won’t stock self-published books unless they have a national distributor, and now we do! You can even reference the book’s ISBN number: 9780983576709.

My only regret about this is that libraries no longer have that glued on pocket with the library card in the back, so you could see who has checked out the book before you did. Technological progress takes the fun out of everything.

I am finding that the Amazon.com search engine is not a very well-functioning tool. At the very least it seems to be doing a disservice to customers looking for real results for search terms. According to Amazon, the results of a search for any terms or phrase are weighted by relevance of the search, sales on Amazon thus far and a few other factors.

After listing my book on Amazon early last month, it is currently sitting at #85 in results for a search of “How to Draw Caricatures”. That means the Amazon search engine thinks that 84 other books are more relevant to someone looking for a book on “how to draw caricatures” than my book.

Now, I’ve got no problem being lower on the list, considering I am a new book and my sales are obviously far behind those that have been selling on Amazon for many months or years. However it seems that way too much weight is given to those sales figures. Of the 84 books in front of mine, only about 12 are really about how to draw caricatures. The other 72 range from such relevant topics as How to Draw Digimon, Drawing Cartoon Baby Animals, Drawing Manga and my personal favorite, How to Draw Cartoon Fish.

I get that the words “How to Draw” are in most of those titles, and not in my title. However the word “caricature” should carry some weight, I should think. I do have the words “how to draw” and variations of it in my keyword terms. Amazon is not doing their customers any favors if a book that is clearly a much better match for someone looking for the term “how to draw caricatures” than a book on drawing fish is buried on page number 8 of the results. How many customers would continue to click through to more search result pages after seeing totally irrelevant results in earlier pages? None.

Oh, well. It’s out of stock on Amazon anyway. One of my shipments to them got lost somewhere, and others are in transit. Eventually I’ll crawl up that list (I hope). In the meantime, thanks to everyone who went to Amazon and posted a review of the book… that is no doubt the only reason I am as high at #85 right now. Some of those reviews are seriously awesome and I am glad that so many people are liking the book. Thanks again!

In other, more positive book news, The Mad Art of Caricature! is now being distributed by Follett Library Resources, Inc. and Book Wholesalers Inc. for procurement by K-12 school libraries and public libraries. So, if you have a local library that you want to carry the book, request it be ordered and they can get copies from those resources. I am also on the verge of signing a distribution deal with a local distributor which would result in the book being available through Ingram and other wholesalers, which would mean it will start to be carried in brick and mortar bookstores, art stores and other retail outlets. That’s basically the final step in the book marketing, unless I sell the reprint rights to a real publisher.

All in all the book is selling well, I have gotten fantastic feedback from virtually everyone who has gotten a copy (including some big-time pro artists that I respect and admire enormously) and I am very glad I did it. Thanks to everyone who has ordered a copy.

As of right now my book is finally listed as “In Stock” on Amazon.com. Only 4 copies remaining when I posted this, but I sent another case out yesterday, so more are on the way. So, if you were waiting to order the book from Amazon, now’s your chance!!

A HUGE thanks to all the people who took the time to write such great and thoughtful reviews this week on the book’s Amazon page. I’m very happy so many are liking the book and genuinely getting something from it.

Phase two of the marketing of my book, The Mad Art of Caricature! is on with the listing of the book on Amazon.com. As I discussed in this post, listing the book through on-line retailers like Amazon (and soon Barnes and Noble) brings the book beyond the relatively narrow audience of this blog and offers it to the world-at-large. The trade off is that Amazon takes a whopping 55% of the cover price, and I have to pay to ship the copies to them, so the amount of profit I realize on a sale through them is significantly less than when I sell it directly through Deadline Demon Publishing. That’s retail, though. Of course those buying it from Amazon don’t get it signed (big deal!) nor can they get an Alfred sketch.

I am asking my readers here for two favors:

1. If you bought a copy of the book from me directly, please review it for me on the Amazon page. Well, only if you liked it. If you thought it sucked, then just ignore this entire post. Reviews increase the exposure of the book and the ranking on search terms. We’ve sold and shipped almost 1,000 copies of the book directly, so if even 10% of buyers took a few moments to post a quick review, we’d have almost 100 reviews! No expectations, but it would greatly appreciated. Please review it today!
2. If you have not bought the book yet and are thinking about it, please do so through Deadline Demon Publishing directly. Amazon is selling it for the same cover price (although they still have not processed my first shipment to them, so they are showing it “out of stock” right now), and while you can save a few bucks on shipping if you are an Amazon “Prime” member (we are matching standard Amazon shipping costs of $3.99 for U.S. orders), note that it will not be signed. If for no other reason, if you are a reader of The MAD Blog!, buying it directly from us or directing people you are recommending the book to to do so helps support the blog. We are still seeing multiple orders per day, and I hope that will continue despite the other outlets that are going to start cropping up.

I’m happy to sell the book through Amazon, of course. If I wasn’t I would not have listed it there. However we’ve been working hard to ship direct orders within a day of placement complete with signatures and personalization, so we are just as efficient and convenient as Amazon… and a whole lot friendlier!  I am hoping those who frequent this blog will help support it by continuing to buy directly, and recommend others to do so.

** Thanks to the many who have already posted positive reviews on Amazon. Frustratingly, the book still does not appear AT ALL on a search for “how to draw caricatures” on Amazon. ???! I can understand being at the bottom of the list as a new item, but NOT AT ALL???!

One of the typical things you will find in any how-to book is a definition of the book’s subject. It is cliche but a good jumping-off point. On page 2 of my book The Mad Art of Caricature, I wanted to play the definition card. The problem was that the best definition I ever heard was one I could not for the life of me remember where I had heard it. That definition was:

“A caricature is a portrait with the volume turned up.”

I spent a fair amount of time trying to find out where I had heard that quote. At the time I wrote the book (late last spring) I did several Google searches for variations on the quote, and came up empty (actually just my own blog and that of a fellow caricaturist who I knew did NOT originate that quote came up). I paged through several caricature books I had including Bob Staake‘s The Complete Book of Caricature, Stephen Heller and Gail Anderson‘s The Savage Mirror and Wendy Wick Reaves‘ Celebrity Caricature in America… nada. I even asked a few other caricaturists I knew if they had any idea who said that. Again, no dice. I finally gave up and went with the following for the book:

From the Mad Art of Caricature, Chapter 1, Page 2:

The best definition I’ve ever heard—and sadly I cannot recall the source—is:

“A caricature is a portrait with the volume turned up.”

Some time after the book’s release I got an email from caricature illustrator extraordinaire John Kascht, letting me know that the quote was his. Hearing that, I am now sure I must have heard that quote during John’s presentation at the National Caricaturist Network’s annual convention in 2000 In San Diego, when he was the special guest speaker. That definition really stuck in my head, although my recollection of where I had heard it did not. That was 11 years ago…

John was mentioned two other times in the book as an example of excellence in caricature illustration, and is an artist I greatly admire. I feel badly that he did not get proper credit for the quote in my book, but I feel I did as much due-diligence as I reasonably could to find out who to attribute it to. Failing that, I made certain that anyone reading the book would not mistake that the definition was mine or think I was claiming it to be.

If the book ever goes to a second printing, this mistake will be corrected. In the meantime I wanted at least the readers of my blog to know who that terrific definition should be attributed to, with my apologies to John.

Anyone who got a copy my book The Mad Art of Caricature found a little insert asking that, if they liked it, to spread the work by mentioning it on Facebook, on their blog or on an appropriate message board forum. Some people really went above and beyond, and posted glowing reviews of the book on their blogs. Here’s a sampling (click on the name to go to the full review):

Krishna Sadasivam (cartoonist- PC Weenies)
“…I have read a LOT of drawing / cartooning / illustration books over the years, and I must say that Tom’s book is right up there with the best of them…  This book is a goldmine for cartoonists and illustrators.”

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Howard Tayler- (cartoonist- Shylock Mercenary)
“…One 30-minute pass through the book tells me that this is going to be my go-to reference work for cartoon faces for years to come… I haven’t learned as much in a speed-read since I skimmed Andrew Loomis’ Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth. That book and this one will now share a shelf next to my drawing table.”

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Terry Dunnett- (caricaturist and illustrator)
“…This is not one of those coffee table ‘look what I can do’ books. It is a 170 page comprehensive guide to the art of caricature that is destined to become a ‘must have’ for caricaturists world wide… If you only ever buy one caricature book – make this the one.”

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Don Mertz- (caricature wood carver)
“…The book is well illustrated with Tom’s original art work as well as his scholarly written descriptions and how to illustrations.  Whether one draws caricatures or carves caricatures this is a most valuable book to study and be inspired into the MAD world of caricature…”

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Kenny Durkin (caricaturist)
“This is not only the most informative book of caricature I’ve ever seen, but the best instructional art book PERIOD.”

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Anton Emdin (Cartoonist and illustrator)
“…I would take a punt that The Mad Art of Caricature will become the modern caricaturists’ bible; a valuable asset to amateurs and pros alike.”

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Keelan Parham (Cartoonist, illustrator and caricaturist)
“…It (the book) is truly amazing, in the quality of artwork, the quality of writing, and the sheer amount of knowledge of it’s subject imparted in it’s pages. Without a doubt, it’s THE definitive guide to drawing caricatures.”

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Ed Steckley (Cartoonist, Illustrator and caricaturist)
“…it’s amazing how much knowledge and experience is packed into those pages.  I know for a fact it’ll get multiple reads around my house, not just as a refresher on caricature, but for inspiration.”

Full disclosure, those last two are good friends of mine. I’ve gotten dozens of emails also praising the book. My thanks to everyone who has ordered a copy… I am glad you are pleased with your purchase.

For those who have not ordered one yet… what are you waiting for???

It took a solid week, but all orders for my book, The Mad Art of Caricature! (at least those placed through today at about 3:00 pm), have shipped. If you pre-ordered or ordered a copy, it is either already delivered or on the way!

For those who ordered the book with the “original sketch from the book” option, a handful will find a note in the package saying to expect their original art to come separately. This is because a handful of the sketches were too big to fit in the package with the book without being folded. Those are being shipped in a separate tube, and all those will be going out tomorrow.

Thanks again to all those who have ordered a copy. I’ve been getting quite a few emails from people who have gotten their books delivered, and everybody seems happy with their purchase. I am going to be adding a “testimonial” section to the order page shortly, so if you have praise for the book send it my way and I will include it on the order page.