Tom's Mad Blog
February 26th, 2008 | Posted in Freelancing
Here’s an entire illustration project from start to finish. The steps are not frequent enough for this to be a “how to”, but it does illustrate the process pretty thoroughly. The client is “The Marlin Company”, which produces workplace and employer communication subscription materials. Part of their products are posters that communicate important workplace ideas and concepts like “Teamwork” and “Quality”, etc. I do art for a humorous line of these posters almost every month. I get the concept and description of the ‘scene’ I need to illustrate. My job is to create an image that is humorous yet gets the message across clearly. This… READ MORE
February 25th, 2008 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
The above is a very quick gag cartoon I did for a travel agent website that is now up and running. I was supposed to do regular cartoons as updates but I don’t know if that is going to happen. I’m just throwing it up here for the sake of having some art in this post, since as always I can’t share my latest jobs until they see publication. I’m going out of town to St. Louis and the National Caricaturist Network Mini-Con on Sunday, so last week and this week have been/are crazy with my trying to get all my jobs out the door… READ MORE
February 24th, 2008 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: As a college art student, or a freelancer, one is faced with many late nights in a row working to meet deadlines. I’ve had many of these instances and I found myself very sleep deprived, but I still had to push on through. I found that the motor skills start to detiriorate after several days of little to no sleep. Inking becomes very difficult and even sketching can be a challenge, not to mention trying to be creative in such a state. Have you ever experienced this, and how do you deal with it. A: Monster Lo-Carb. Seriously, I know what you are saying.… READ MORE
February 23rd, 2008 | Posted in General
Still crazy busy with deadlines for multiple clients, so today I am just going to post this reminder again about my guest speaker appearance and inking workshop March 2-5th in St. Louis. It’s my last reminder, I promise… although I’ll be posting reports on the event after it’s over. It’s not too late to register and attend… in fact you can do it at the door (just not with a credit card). You do not need to attend the entire three day event as they have special admission fees for just a workshop or some of the seminars that will be held. There are some… READ MORE
February 22nd, 2008 | Posted in General
I’m paying the price right now for spending too much time doing tutorials on the blog. Ugh… Meanwhile <insert shameless plug here> don’t forget to visit The MAD Blog Store to get your very own T-shirt, poster, clock or other piece of crap with the Dreaded Deadline Demon or The MAD Blog logo on it! READ MORE
February 21st, 2008 | Posted in Tutorials
This series of “How to Draw Caricatures” tutorials are a just a small taste of a larger and much more in-depth book I wrote called The Mad Art of Caricature! The book is 175 full-color pages, lavishly illustrated and contains greatly expanded explanations of the concepts presented in these tutorials, as well and a great deal of additional material on caricaturing other facial features, posture, hands, expression and more, techniques on drawing from live models, doing caricature for freeplace illustration and for MAD Magazine. This is a must have book for anyone interested in caricature, cartooning or humorous illustration. You can order it online here.… READ MORE
February 20th, 2008 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch is a quick study of “Firefly” and “Serenity” star Gina Torres. I never really watched the TV show but I did see the movie, and I find her face very fascinating… her eyes are sleepy but intense and her mouth has a perpetual pursed look to it. Lot’s of fun to draw. READ MORE
February 19th, 2008 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!
The high definition disk format war is basically over, and HD DVD is down for the count. All that’s left is to see if the “winner”, Blu-Ray, will eventually win the bigger battle… taking over for standard DVD as the next generation of entertainment media. After the surprise announcement several weeks ago by Warner Bros. Studios that it was dropping support for HD DVD and going exclusively Blu-Ray, it’s been one knockout punch after another for HD DVD. In the last week alone, Netflix announced it was dropping HD DVD offerings through their on-line mail based movie rental business, Best Buy said they would recommend… READ MORE
