Tom's Mad Blog
April 28th, 2008 | Posted in News
Artwork by Jay Kennedy Scholarship winner Juana Medina A few days ago I wrote a brief post about last year’s dual recipients of the National Cartoonist Society Foundation’s scholarships. This year the NCSF awarded the first Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, an award established by a donation to the NSCF by KingFeatures in memory of the late jay Kennedy, to Juana Medina, a sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). From The Daily Cartoonist: The National Cartoonists Society Foundation (NCSF) announced the winner of the first annual Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, Juana Medina, a sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Medina… READ MORE
April 27th, 2008 | Posted in General
Q: After working overseas as an illustrator for a while, I made the mistake of moving back home to Scotland. In short, there was no work. At all. So, like any plucky young cartoonist, I hung up my brushes and moved on to other work (editing magazines.). Now I’m trying to get back into the swing of things, and I’m finding it hard to draw again (it’s been a little over 18 months now). Any tips on getting my skills back to a decent level? A: That’s really impossible to answer as it’s very different for everybody. I can only tell you what I would… READ MORE
April 26th, 2008 | Posted in MAD Magazine
A little birdie told me that the cover of MAD #490 has been appearing on the internet in a few places, apparently leaked by some Time Warner employee calling himself “Deep Schmuck”. Cover above is from movie blogsite /Film. Interestingly, an actual article from the magazine is also shown on that /Film page: Click to see a close up from /Film Being a good boy respectful of copyright, I will wait until the issue actually comes out to post the contents and some peeks at my piece in it, which I won’t tell you is a parody of 30 Rock, so don’t ask. READ MORE
April 25th, 2008 | Posted in News
EDIT- Having read the actual bills on release, I have a number of corrections and futher information in accordance to the actual bill’s language and content. I’d recommend reading this more recent blog post to separate the facts from the FUD. Tuesday the Illustrator’s Partnership received draft copies of the 2008 version of the Orphan Works bill I’ve discussed so often here. The bill itself was released yesterday. I’ve read and blogged a lot about this issue. Here’s a link to the articles I’ve done on this horrifically misguided piece of legislation. A week or two ago I found this sarcastic but reasonably well written… READ MORE
April 24th, 2008 | Posted in General
I use WordPress blog software for The MAD Blog, and while the only other software I’ve tried is Blogger I like WordPress a lot. It’s easy to use and maintain, and the extensive number of free plug in programs allows for a lot of flexibility to get the blog to do what I want it to do. The MAD blog is self hosted, meaning it’s not a WordPress.com based blog, so when updates to WordPress are released there is always a little anxiety when I finally take the plunge and do the update. A blog’s “theme”, meaning the format and look of the blog itself,… READ MORE
April 23rd, 2008 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Not very ambitious this week, but here’s a very quick and cartoony study of George W. Bush. It was actually one of several sketches I did early on in a product illustration job that I just wrapped up. READ MORE
April 22nd, 2008 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
Back to the studio tonight, then back to the usual thing. The freelance work doesn’t stop when I’m on the road, and this trip was no exception. I finished a product illustration job while here in Massachusetts using my Wacom tablet for part of it and borrowing my buddy Ed Steckley‘s new Cintiq portable for the last part. I have to say I thought it worked very well and may have to pick one of those up this summer. I also did the above sketch for a workplace poster job while sitting at the theme park in between drawing caricatures and working with the new… READ MORE
April 21st, 2008 | Posted in General
I’ve been at my theme park operation at Six Flags New England since Friday. I’ll be returning tomorrow afternoon. It’s always a big job getting these things up and running… especially this one. Fortunately I’ve got good people taking care of things. I’ve been trying to work with the rookie artists and tweak the details all weekend. Here’s some pics of some of the various locations we have in this park doing caricatures, airbrush t-shirts and airbrush tattoos: Our busiest caricature location in the Harbor area Airbrush T-Shirts, hats and other apparel Temporary Airbrush Tattoos- one of three locations. This one is in the DC… READ MORE
