Tom's Mad Blog
August 7th, 2014 | Posted in Tales from the Theme Park
“The Drawing Muscle” This isn’t much of a story but it is something I used to freak my fellow caricaturists out with all the time. The technique I learned to draw live caricatures invoked using a lead holder and a 4B or 6B 3mm graphite lead. Many live caricaturists use a marker for their lines, which is wonderful and can be used to great effect. I learned with graphite, and the principal reason for this was we used an airbrush to add the color. With the airbrush it was better to use graphite as it was not as intensely black as the lines from a… READ MORE
August 6th, 2014 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s a cop-out on SotW due to my being way, way, WAAAAYYYY out of town. This is the pencil sketch for my latest Marlin Co. poster, a Halloween theme as you perceive. READ MORE
August 5th, 2014 | Posted in General
According to editor John Ficarra in this article… forever. He cites that while circulation on newsstands has fluctuated and dropped over the years, the subscriber base of 100,o00 stays almost perfectly constant. So how long can Mad maintain its current state? Forever, Ficarra insists. He’s quick to point out that although newsstand sales are down, the number of Mad subscribers … roughly 100,000 … has held steady for pretty much its entire life. For generations of kids, he’s seen a pattern in the subscribers: They pick it up around the age of 12, drop it at age 16, then subscribe again out of nostalgia in… READ MORE
August 5th, 2014 | Posted in News
I’m currently enroute to an undisclosed U.S. Military location where the weather is bound to be hot and sandy with a chance of camels. I’ve got a few blog posts queued up but things might be a little spotty on Tom’s MAD Blog this week. Don’t worry about my safety on this trip, though… if things get hairy I can always pick up Rick Kirkman and throw him at the enemy while the rest of us run. READ MORE
August 4th, 2014 | Posted in Monday MADness
Yes, that’s late MAD publisher Bill Gaines on a moped speeding along the streets of… somewhere. It’s one of several pictures posted on a recent update on the progress of the “When We Went MAD!” documentary that was successfully funded on Kickstarter back in February. Check out the update and lots of other great pictures of the Usual Gang of Idiots on the update posted on their Kickstarter page. …that reminds me, I have to get the art done for the movie poster!!! READ MORE
August 3rd, 2014 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: As a caricaturist you are analyzing thousands of faces. So I am wondering if you have got super-powers in the following sense: Can you better than other people see, if two persons are relatives: father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, cousins, etc.? A: I wish. My only super-power is the ability to procrastinate until the very last second and still pull off a deadline. Actually I think the opposite of what you describe might be more true, at least for me. I think as a caricaturist I recognize things like expression and subtle facial or body language nuances related to personality… READ MORE
August 1st, 2014 | Posted in General
I’ve written here many times that, as a freelancer, you sometimes end up with some really off-the-wall jobs that take you outside the realms of your usual kind of client. The above image is one of those. Earlier in the spring I got a call about a job designing someone’s 50th birthday invitation. That kind of call or email is not unusual, I get a lot of those kinds of requests asking if I’ll do a caricature of grandma and grandpa for their anniversary, or somebody’s boss for his birthday. Those calls seldom end up as real jobs, however, frankly because those asking don’t understand… READ MORE
July 31st, 2014 | Posted in Illustration Throwback Thursday
Back in the early 2000’s the Minnesota Twins pro baseball team had a monthly magazine that was both distributed at the ballpark and sold on news stands… and the Twins were actually a good team as opposed to sucking as they do today. I did a fair amount of work for the magazine in 2000 and 2001, including some single page comics illustrating great moments from the season and feature illustrations. Here are a few from 2001 (clicky any to embiggen…): This was for a story about baseball superstitions This is one of those single page comics, illustrating pitcher Eric Milton’s no hitter. The Twins… READ MORE
