Here is this week’s column spot illustration for “The Independent“. I am told this feature will have a total of eight of these caricatures. This is number seven. This has been a fun little project because these illustrations are done quickly and loosely, without a lot of overthinking. READ MORE
Q: Obviously most freelancers start at the bottom of the barrel and in the beginning of their career may take on some less glamorous jobs. However, once they start becoming a bit more established and gain bigger clients, how do they separate themselves from previous clients in order to focus on the jobs that they had been trying to get in the first place? A: A freelancer is not a factory, where you can add more employees and equipment to increase production when demand gets high. As a single artist you can only produce so much work. Therefore, once you reach a point where you… READ MORE
Click for a closer look… Several months ago I did a little side project for a couple of enterpenuers who were designing and building a poker play website. They wanted a more fun, humorous and cartoony environment and feel to the game than your typical video game looking sites. The results are now online at www.5PMPoker.com. The project was pretty involved. First I needed to design a playing environment that would be fun and unique, but would also work within the dimensions they needed. They wanted some silly animations that would either randomly move or move when some goal or event happened in the game.… READ MORE
This is out “in the wild” on the interwebby and will be in MAD #499: You have to feel a little sorry for the guy, but how stupid can you be? Doesn’t he have any handlers or advisers around to tell him taking hits off bongs at parties where everyone has a camera in their cell phone is not going to be kept a secret? READ MORE
I am officially getting excited about the Watchmen movie, especially after I saw this “public service announcement” recently: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WsciSNVS0[/youtube] There are a lot of fans of the graphic novel that are still worried about the film adaptation of their beloved Watchmen falling short of expectations. I’m not one of them, even though I am an enormous fan of the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons masterpiece. Why not? Simply put, there is no possible way for a film, unless it was 10 hours long, to capture all the intricacies and subtleties of the graphic novel, so I don’t expect it to. The Watchmen is incredibly involved… I… READ MORE
This has been all the rage on Facebook for the last week or two. The concept is that you write a note with 25 random facts about yourself and then “tag” 25 of your Facebook friends with the results. They in turn need to do the same, tagging 25 of their friends and so on. Ordinarily I hate these kinds of things. I get seemingly endless invites to join all sorts of goofy groups and add applications on Facebook that I always ignore, but this one is kind of fun. So, since not everyone is on Facebook (and sorry to those who saw this there… READ MORE
If there was ever any doubt that Time Warner’s financial struggles were a key factor in MAD‘s switching to quarterly publication and laying off several (more) staffers, this article from My Way News should squash it: Time Warner swings to 4Q loss on hefty writedown TW lost $16.03 billion in the last quarter of 2008. Knowing all that was going down, is it any wonder TW sold all the remaining and most valuable original MAD cover artwork, and then cut publication and personnel? It was a company wide bloodletting, and althogh recent drops in circulation didn’t help even if MAD was still selling over 200,000… READ MORE
Here’s another “cold” sketch where I was completely unfamiliar with the subject. When you attempt a drawing like that you are entirely dependent on that one photo reference to provide all the information for your drawing. That makes it superficial and often causes it to lack life and/or the kind of strong likeness and personality you can get by drawing someone who’s features and mannerisms you are more familiar with. This is Oscar nominated actress Amy Adams from the movie “Doubt”. I should be more familiar with her as she is a hometown girl from Minneapolis. I thought she had an interesting nose and fun… READ MORE
Sign up for Tom's FREE newsletter:
