Tom's Mad Blog
January 22nd, 2009 | Posted in General
Very busy right now, but I ran across this video on the National Caricaturist Network message boards this morning, posted by Canadian editorial cartoonist, caricaturist and illustrator Patrick LaMontagne that I thought was not only hilarious but eerily accurate. If you are ever wondering why art directors sometimes make what seems like a simple, straightforward illustration job very complicated and convoluted instead, here’s your answer: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqPYeTSYng[/youtube] It would be less funny if it wasn’t so true. Replace the stop sign with an illustration of someone driving a car or similar, and you get the idea. READ MORE
January 21st, 2009 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch is a warm up study of “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel. READ MORE
January 20th, 2009 | Posted in General
Number One Son Thomas is ready to rock! I took a break from my current crazy deadline job to finally take my twelve year old son Tom to his first concert last night… AC/DC. I say “finally” because I had purchased the tickets through my trainer months ago as an early Christmas present for Tom, and we went to the concert center when AC/DC was in town only to find out they were making TWO stops in St. Paul, MN on this tour… and we had tickets for the show two months later. Ooops. We went home disappointed that night, but made up for it… READ MORE
January 19th, 2009 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
BIG, crazy MAD job on the board right now. This one has an odd backstory and is, as far as I know, unique in the storied history of the magazine. Naturally I will not be able to share any of that story until the job is in print, but as that will be NEXT MONTH in MAD #499 it won’t be too long before I’m able to tell the tale. In the meantime I am working furiously on the project in question… no time for any other jobs. Before I got started on it late last week I finished this poster job for Marlin: Job:… READ MORE
January 18th, 2009 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: MAD’s big 500th issue is coming up up in March… can you spill the beans on any plans MAD might have for the milestone? Will you have anything in it? A: The guys at MAD are being pretty tight lipped about the plans for No. 500. I actually don’t know much at all about what to expect, and that includes what little I know that I cannot tell you. Rumor has it that the issue will be bigger than a normal issue (more pages anyway), but that is not confirmed officially. MAD‘s Maddest Writer Dick Debartolo has posted the following in several MAD Message… READ MORE
January 17th, 2009 | Posted in Freelancing
I’ve got a killer MAD job on the board right now with a brutal deadline, so posts this next week may be a bit abbreviated. Here’s my latest newspaper political caricature for the column “Good Old Boys Gone Bad” in North Carolina’s The Independent print and on-line newspaper. READ MORE
January 16th, 2009 | Posted in General
Back to shameless begging… The great Google ad experiment is over. Starting today the ads (as you can see) that for the last year or so have been littering my sidebar are gone. I placed them there in an effort to “monetize” my blog… in other words try to make a little dough to help justify the time and effort I put into The MAD Blog. The idea was to get advertisers to pay me through the Google Adsense program, which would generate some revenue but not cost the readers of the blog a dime. It didn’t work out too well. The way Google ads… READ MORE
January 15th, 2009 | Posted in MAD Magazine
I’m still not exactly sure how it happened, but somewhere along the line I ended up establishing the reputation of being able to “do a crowd scene”. I am sure my art director at MAD Magazine, Sam Viviano, can sympathize. He is well known for his work with crowd scenes, and all that implies. Simply put, it means you end up getting a lot of jobs doing complicated crowd scenes because… well…. you CAN. In the world of freelancing there is never anything wrong with getting jobs. However when a lot of jobs end up being time consuming crowd scenes, you sometimes just wish for… READ MORE
