Richmond Illustration Inc.

Tom's Mad Blog

Q: When you were first starting out, how did your parents react to your decision to become a cartoonist? Were they supportive of your chosen profession, try to talk you out of it, or somewhere in between? Also, how did the in-laws feel about having their daughter marry someone who aspired to become one of “the usual gang of idiots”? A: As a young kid my parents were very supportive of my desire to be an artist. My dad worked as a manager for a chain of grocery stores and would bring home reams of this computer track-paper that was used with old dot-matrix printers… READ MORE

Friday Book Sneak Peek- Chapter 8

September 29th, 2011 | Posted in General

Click for a closer look… This week’s sneak peek is the opening splash of Chapter Eight: Caricature in Illustration. In this chapter, I discuss doing caricatures for illustration jobs for publications and other kinds of clients. I go over how “narrative” is a crucial part of successful illustration work, the differences between doing caricature for caricature’s sake and doing it for illustration work, the influence of style and some of the challenges live caricaturists face in taking what they do in a live setting and applying it to publication work. This chapter is 10 pages long and contains 17 illustrations, all of which are examples… READ MORE

Cleveland Magazine Spot Illustrations

September 29th, 2011 | Posted in Freelancing

These just saw print in the latest issue of Cleveland Magazine for their “Best of Cleveland 2011 Awards” feature: Best of Food: Luxury Sunday Buffet Best of Entertainment: October “Dead Ride” zombie bike race Best of Drink: The “Slap Shot”… A fun little project. They wanted bold and colorful… Here are the pencil sketches: READ MORE

MAD Animated Gold

September 28th, 2011 | Posted in General

This segment (which I did NOT work on) aired on the Cartoon Network’s animated MAD show recently, and if you hang out on the internet at all you will find it a total riot: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gufXf67qBcc[/youtube] READ MORE

Sketch o’the Week

September 28th, 2011 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week

This week’s Sketch o’the Week is actor Leslie David Baker, AKA Stanley Hudson from the TV Show The Office. I have to admit I have never seen a full episode of The Office, although I have no doubt the show deserves all of it’s many accolades. In the meantime… what a face! READ MORE

Kenosha Festival of Cartooning Recap

September 27th, 2011 | Posted in News

Last week I was privileged to be a part of the inaugural Kenosha Festival of Cartooning which took place, fittingly enough, in the lakeside town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, on September 14th-16th. Kenosha is located right between the cities of Milwaukee, Wi to the north and Chicago IL to the south, on the shores of Lake Michigan. It’s a lovely little burg (actually not so little, I was told it’s the fourth largest city in Wisconsin behind only Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay) that was primarily an auto-manufacturing town until Chrysler mostly packed up and left in the early 1990’s. Since then it’s mainly a bedroom… READ MORE

Return of The MAD Blog!

September 26th, 2011 | Posted in News

The MAD Blog returns from a brief hiatus while we changed servers and did a whole lot of “behind the scenes” changes to the website. Most of the changes you will not notice, but the website was completely recoded from PHP to ASPX and is now much more mobile-friendly than it used to be. There are still plenty of tweaks that need to be done on that latter front, but now if you visit the website on either a mobile phone or an iPad, you will see a special version of the site that is optimized for either device. Both mobile and iPad versions use… READ MORE