Richmond Illustration Inc.

Tom's Mad Blog

Sketch o’the Week- What Day Is It?

January 8th, 2014 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week

This week’s sketch is for my youngest daughter, The Effervescent Gabrielle, who loves this commercial. READ MORE

New Pebble Steel

January 7th, 2014 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!

It’s All Geek to Me Dept. It’s been a long time since I did one of these types of posts, but as I am a gadget junkie yesterday’s Pebble watch news was of interest. The good news? Pebble introduced a new design, called the Pebble Steel. It’s made of… wait for it… stainless steel (regular or black matte). It also has slightly different button spacing and profile, a reconfigured charging port, is waterproof to 5 atms, significantly less border space around the face, and comes with both a matching steel band and a leather band. The bad news? It’s $250. I get a lot of… READ MORE

Monday MADness!- Pigskin Pandemonium!

January 6th, 2014 | Posted in Monday MADness

In honor of the end of the football season…well, as a Green Bay Packer fan it’s over for me anyway…here’s a real blast from the past. The following are spot illustrations I did for MAD‘s long-defunct weekly original web feature “MADness of the Week“. This one was from an article on Fantasy Football, circa 2000. The text from the piece is long gone, but the gags are pretty self evident: READ MORE

Sunday Mailbag: Background Gags Added When?

January 5th, 2014 | Posted in Mailbag

Q: When you are putting together panels for a tv or movie spoof, do you cement the basics first and add the “chicken fat” in the background later, or do you do everything at once? Do the background gags come to you on the spot? A: Certainly I am concerned with the basic layouts, storytelling, caricatures and the scripted gags first, and the “chicken fat” comes second. For those who don’t know what the term “chicken fat” refers to, it was coined by MAD great Will Elder and meant all the background gags he crammed into his panels. From my post after Elder’s passing away:… READ MORE

The Copyright is Afoot!

January 3rd, 2014 | Posted in General

A blog reader emailed me the other day to ask if I’d heard about this news story concerning the copyright regarding the Sherlock Holmes characters. I had, in fact. Being a Sherlockian myself (#1 in Minnesota, #9 in U.S. in Holmes Trivia on “QuizUp”… just sayin’), and someone who has a vested interest in things like copyrights, I found it to be a very interesting turn of events. Some background: Sherlock Holmes has been in the public domain in Britain for years, but not completely so in the United States. The holdup in the U.S. has been the ten stories that Doyle published after 1922.… READ MORE

Dogbert vs. Rat

January 2nd, 2014 | Posted in General

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibiObtFLGyE[/youtube] If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s worth a look. This is a promotional video for Wacom’s portable devices featuring Dilbert‘s Scott Adams and Pearl Before Swine‘s Stephan Pastis. It shows you how the guys and gals behind the comics are often just as funny in person (or on video). BTW, I originally saw this on The Daily Cartoonist, so a tip o’the hat to Alan Gardner and that terrific resource. READ MORE

Happy New Year!

January 1st, 2014 | Posted in General

Here’s wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2014! READ MORE

Rare Personal Commission

December 31st, 2013 | Posted in General

Regular readers of my blog know that I almost never accept personal commissions. This has nothing to do with my not wanting to do them, it’s a simple question of not having enough physical time in a day to do it all. Every once and awhile the stars align and I am able to accept something of that nature… a lull in my work on the drawing board coupled with a stretch of my not traveling anywhere and a commission subject that is intriguing plus a client who is not in a hurry to get the art. This all happened a few weeks back when… READ MORE