Tom's Mad Blog
September 4th, 2008 | Posted in General
My husband Tom asked me to do him a favor. This is not unusual, most days, at least once, I get a request for a favor. Usually it’s to help with paper work, run to the bank or post office, or deliver supplies to one of our booths. Being that I can’t draw or even ink the boxes for his MAD pages, (Yes, this was attempted and I failed miserably) I try to help out where and when I can. Anything so that he can keep working on the deadline. Today’s favor had to do with The MAD Blog. He is trying to finish up… READ MORE
September 3rd, 2008 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch is a 10 minute warm-up study of my coincidental obsession, Christina Applegate. She’s been in the news recently because of her sudden fight with breast cancer, which it looks like she has beaten. God bless her. I say “coincidental obsession” because for some bizarre reason the Universe has chosen me to be Christina’s official publication caricature artist. I’ve related this story before after I did her latest sitcom as a parody in MAD. Back in the early 90’s I did the pencil work on a comic book series called “Married… with Children” for NOW Comics, and naturally drew Christina all the time… READ MORE
September 2nd, 2008 | Posted in General
This is a holiday that you will find on no official calendar, but it’s one all theme park caricaturists adore. Read that last link if you don’t understand… you need to spend at least one entire summer sweating out on the midway drawing endless lines of snot nosed kids, vain teenagers, drunk couples and surly art critics in order to get it fully. As a theme park concession owner, that goes double for me. Yesterday I was ultimately responsible for 12 art concession locations in three states with a combined work force of about 60 artists. Today… Nada. Nothing. Zero. Oh, except I have a… READ MORE
September 1st, 2008 | Posted in News
Last week I wrote about the Walt Disney Hometown Toonfest event in Marceline, MO and how my chapter of the National Cartoonists Society is going to have our fall meeting at the event. Since I wrote that and began organizing our chapter’s meeting I have been tapped by the Toonfest organizers to both emcee the speaker’s presentations on both Friday (Student Day) and Saturday as well as do my own speaking presentation on both days. Looks like I just went from a spectator to a spectacle for the weekend event. Here is a link to the speaker lineup for the event, and here is the… READ MORE
August 31st, 2008 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I worked doing retail caricatures I know that it is hard to hire someone trustworthy and is a good artist. Especially to be a manager at one of your concessions. Here in L.A. we always had someone (even managers) pilfering from the till. Are the artists permitted to display their own samples? Will you ever acknowledge them (not the criminals but the worthy artists) on your blog? A: I don’t often write about the business side of the retail caricature business here because I don’t think that is a topic that anyone but a very small few might care about or get anything out… READ MORE
August 30th, 2008 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
Whew… No matter how much I try and guard against it, every once and a while a freelance job “get’s away from you” and ends up being 10 times the amount of work you thought it would be. I just finished such a project tonight that has been on my board, at various stages of concepts, pencils, approvals, revisions, reviews and finals for about 4 months. It didn’t seem like such a big job when I took it on, but it ballooned into a lot of work. Fortunately the clients were very patient, and were willing to adjust my compensation when it became apparent the… READ MORE
August 29th, 2008 | Posted in General
Eccccch! READ MORE
August 28th, 2008 | Posted in General
Here’s another of those oddball advertising jobs that come along, you do them and get paid for them, but they never get produced or used in the way intended. This project was done a few years ago for an ad agency. They wanted a “superhero” team designed in a style somewhat reminiscent of the Bruce Timm animated look for some ad campaign pitch to Canon, the photocopy/consumer electronics company. I got the job via referral from a fellow illustrator. I needed to design 5 heroes, two of which were a hero/sidekick combo. I honestly don’t remember the exact details but the leader of the group… READ MORE
