Tom's Mad Blog
August 9th, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Hold on to your warrants, boys and girls! It’s time for yet another episode of a look back at my twenty years of art for MAD Magazine… DUN DUN! This week we take a look back at MAD‘s spoof of one of the roughly two dozen “Law and Order” spin-offs, “Law and Order” Criminal Intent”, written by MAD‘s Maddest writer Dick Debartolo and first appearing in MAD #449, January 2005. Sadly the pencil roughs for this one are lost, but I do have scans of the inks! Clicky any to embiggen. This was and remains one of my favorite TV parodies I ever did for… READ MORE
August 8th, 2021 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: When not dictated by the script, how do you decide the positioning/gestures of hands? As comics are a visual medium, I’d assume static hands with no play make it a dull panel, but I would also assume too many wacky gestures would distract from the tone. Needless to say, when the focus of a panel is some dialogue without action, where do you draw the line? A: Actually the position/gestures of hands are almost always dictated by the script. Not directly, where the script says “have the speaker waving hands frantically”, but by the dialogue and the emotion the character is supposed to be… READ MORE
August 6th, 2021 | Posted in Stuff from my Studio
It’s time for another enthralling look at some of the stuff in my studio! Today features a couple of awards I was honored with from the International Society of Caricature Artists (aka ISCA, formerly the National Caricaturist’s Network). The ISCA is an organization of professional caricature artists from all over the world. It started in 1989 primarily as a group of live “gig” artists but over the years has grown to encompass any kind of professional caricaturist including illustrators, animators, etc. Every year (at least ones that aren’t in the middle of a global pandemic) the ISCA has a convention/competition where caricaturists from all over… READ MORE
August 5th, 2021 | Posted in Illustration Throwback Thursday
I haven’t posted one of these in a long while, so today’s “Illustration Throwback Thursday” is a look at one of the “workplace posters” I did for many years for a client called “The Marlin Company”. These were 17″ x 17″ illustrations that generally illustrated some message about teamwork, reducing stress at work, workplace safety, or some other employment issue. I happen to have the pencil sketch I sent them for approval also: I did one of these every month for about 15 years. I don’t have an exact count but I am sure I did over 150 of them. This one was done in… READ MORE
August 4th, 2021 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
This week’s sketch subject is British pop music superstar Dua Lipa! As usual the original is available in the Studio Store. READ MORE
August 3rd, 2021 | Posted in General
I’ve been getting a number of inquiries about if the original art from Desmond Devlin and my upcoming book of movie parodies will be for sale. The answer is yes, some of it, eventually. A number of the pages from the book are already spoken for through the different tiers we had during our Indiegogo campaign. All the pages from the parodies of “Psycho” and “Toy Story 4” will be going to our two super-ultra-uber “Megalomanic” backers. They each both chose the movie they wanted us to do and sponsored the entire parody, and get the entire set of pages from their spoof. Those at… READ MORE
August 2nd, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
It’s Monday! That means another step on our excruciatingly slow creep through my work at MAD magazine! This week we have a look at MAD‘s parody of “The Bernie Mac Show”, written by MAD editor David Shayne and first appearing in MAD #447, November 2004. I still have the pencil roughs of this one. This was one of those show I had never seen any episodes of, and it was WAY before streaming and on-demand was a thing, so I had to set me DVR (THAT was a thing then) to record some episodes to do my research. Fortunately it had been on a few… READ MORE
August 1st, 2021 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Q: I have been using the principles in your book for theme park style caricatures. So far I feel I’ve improved on drawing caricatures head on but I really struggle to draw them at 3/4 angle. How important is it for a theme park style caricature artists to be able to draw front AND 3/4 angle caricatures? A: A theme park (or any live style) caricaturist need not ever draw the face at any angle they don’t wish to. You can do full face caricatures forever. Profile caricaturists can do the same. However being able to draw 3/4 faces gives you another option and keeps… READ MORE
