Tom's Mad Blog
December 31st, 2014 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Kind of busy right now so I don’t have time to do a real SotW… here are a few concept drawings I did this past summer for a company that provides all the artwork for the Palm restaurants around the country. If you’ve never been to a Palm, it’s a restaurant with the walls covered in cartoons, caricatures and illustrations depicting famous people from the area, patrons, etc. as well as general gags and humor. I did the following as concepts for possible inclusion in the redesigned Palm in L.A. I have no idea if any of them actually made the walls down there. If… READ MORE
December 30th, 2014 | Posted in News
Posting on Tom’s MAD Blog for the next week or two might be a little spotty as we get ready to launch a brand new, redesigned website in early 2015! I’ll still post here and there, but regular posting activity won’t resume until after the launch of the new website. READ MORE
December 29th, 2014 | Posted in Monday MADness
This week’s Monday MADness features my artwork from Dick DeBarolo‘s parody of “Hell’s Kitchen” in MAD #470, October 2006. Below are the pencil roughs, final colored art and (bizarrely) the third and forth pages inked and set up in the layout with text in place. I cannot remember why I did that with pages three and four… must have been for a presentation or something demonstrating the pre-color artwork in place. Anyway, clicky any to embiggen: Final splash page art The pencil roughs… Inked with copy, page 3 and 4 spread Page 3 final Page 4 final Panel three features “Pearls Before Swine” cartoonist Stephan… READ MORE
December 28th, 2014 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: Drawing is just one aspect of the art of live caricature. Another aspect is smalltalk with your subject. You have already written about an extraordinary conversation “drawing somebody naked”. Can you give an example of a typical conversation during a live caricature? Are you talking about the weather or something like that? And what are you doing if your subject is a child or a person who does not understand English?¬¨‚Ć A: You’re right about drawing being only one aspect of the art of live caricature. Live caricature at its best is a performance art. Those who can combine great drawing with great “banter”,… READ MORE
December 26th, 2014 | Posted in General
Last May at the NCS Reuben Awards Weekend in San Diego, Reubens Master of Ceremonies Tom Gammill put together a great video intro featuring a montage of clips from “The Simpsons” that featured gags about cartoons, comics, cartoonists and MAD Magazine. There were a surprising number of them, including a few cartooning luminaries like Cathy Guisewite, Sergio Aragon?¬©s and Mell Lazarus (among some others I can’t quite remember) being “Simpsonized”. After the video there was an audio clip featuring Homer Simpson as voiced by Dan Castellaneta opening the evening: I did the above quick ink and watercolor caricature as a thank you to Dan for… READ MORE
December 24th, 2014 | Posted in General
The Happiest of Holidays to all, from the Richmonds (throwback Christmas Card circa 1999 above)! READ MORE
December 23rd, 2014 | Posted in Freelancing
I occasionally get the opportunity to do work for Library Journal and School Library Journal magazines, and earlier this fall I did a quick piece for them featuring a caricature of Travis Jonker, a well-known book reviewer and librarian who is very social-media saavy (and very tall and lanky). Travis did an article on social media in a recent issue of Library Journal, and I did the above illustration for it (set in the layout here, thus the greek text). Here’s a rough comp and one of the initial sketches as well: READ MORE
December 22nd, 2014 | Posted in Monday MADness
This week’s Monday MADness features a few panels from “MAD‘s Inside Scoop On This Year’s Stupidest Holiday Movies” written by Desmond Devlin and Scott Maiko in MAD #459, Nov. 2005. Also as a bonus, the pencil roughs at the bottom (clicky any image to embiggen): King Kong Tom Cruise‘s lunatic couch-bouncing Oprah appearance was used by computer animators as a basis for one of Kong’s rampages. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire To save time in make-up, Daniel Radcliff agreed to let the famous lightning blot scar be permanently seared into his forehead with a red hot linoleum knife, having made peace with the… READ MORE
