Tom's Mad Blog
May 6th, 2012 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: Do you have any tips on how to change a person’s expression and retain a likeness. Say you have photo of someone smiling but they want a surprised or angry look. Any advice? A: In the case of a single image of a subject, I would require the subject (assuming it’s the subject asking for the changed expression, like in¬¨‚Ć a gift caricature) to give me a reference showing the kind of expression they are asking for. Even though faces, for the most part, follow somewhat similar patterns when making an expression like “surprise” or “anger”, you cannot pretend you really know what a… READ MORE
May 4th, 2012 | Posted in General
In honor of Edvard Munch‘s painting “The Scream” setting an auction sales record of $119 million, MAD posted some of the many parodies of the famous painting that they have done (including the one above) over the years on their official blog, The Idiotical. Check out the others here. Here’s a parody I did of that painting for the Ray Grigg‘s film I Want Your Money. It appeared hanging on the wall in the Oval Office in one of the animated segments: Not really much effort on my part, I simply replaced the face of the screaming man with that of our current Commander in… READ MORE
May 3rd, 2012 | Posted in Freelancing
Clicky to Embiggen… This two page-spread illustration appears in the May issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids. It illustrates an article on the Oklahoma City Thunder pro basketball team. The gag with the nesting dolls is twofold. First, it depicts how their “inside game” is integral to their success, and also how most of the players were more-or-less anonymous behind Kevin Durant (until this year, anyway). The players shown (left to right): Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Serge Ibaka, Kendrick Perkins. A bit of a departure from my usual style, which is always fun to do. READ MORE
May 2nd, 2012 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch is a study of tough-guy actor Stephen Lang, currently formerly starring in the TV series Terra Nova, but might be most famous to the general public for playing the bad-ass Colonel in Avatar. Of course, who could forget his turn as Khalar Zym in last year’s Conan the Barbarian? . . . oh, yeah, EVERYBODY has hopefully forgotten everything about that dreadful movie. I hope I can be in that good a shape when I am 60. READ MORE
May 1st, 2012 | Posted in News
The second printing of The Mad Art of Caricature! has arrived…just in time as I was down to my last hundred or so copies. They look good, with the same high quality, glossy, color pages and tight binding. No new content, but a few stray typos and corrections were made. The big news this time around is I have an official distributor, Itasca Book Distributors, which means the book will soon be available through wholesalers like Ingram. What this means is that brick and mortar stores like Barnes and Noble will now be able to order and carry my book. Booksellers basically refuse to carry… READ MORE
April 30th, 2012 | Posted in News
…sort of. The original name of this blog was supposed to be Tom’s MAD Blog!, but in the ensuing craziness that was the website redesign some time ago the graphics came to read The MAD Blog!. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because it didn’t seem very important. Well, MAD Magazine now has it’s own blog, and while it’s called The Idiotical and not The MAD Blog, it seemed to me that it might be a bit confusing to some people doing a search for “MAD Magazine Blog” that this blog would be one of the top hits. I didn’t want anyone… READ MORE
April 29th, 2012 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I work a 40 hour week, 50 weeks a year, and have been since 1978. I see actual retirement in the next ten years. As a artist and freelancer, what does retirement look like for you? No plan at all, freelance part time, or continue present pace until last breath is exhaled? A: Freelancer artists face the same challenges to retirement that any self-employed person does. You have no employer who is providing a pension plan for you, so sou simply have to plan ahead for it . . .¬¨‚Ć and the younger you are when you do it, the better. Social Security is… READ MORE
April 27th, 2012 | Posted in Freelancing
Clicky to Embiggen . . . Here is my 2012 page in the illustrator’s sourcebook The Directory of Illustration no. 29. I had to search for quite a while to find images from the past year (or ones I had not used before and liked) for this one. It just seems like I didn’t do many smaller/stand alone images that would work well in this kind of layout. . . too many $#@%$@ crowd scenes last year! READ MORE
