Richmond Illustration Inc.

Tom's Mad Blog

Sketch O’The Week

August 29th, 2007 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week

Here’s something a little different for “Sketch O’The Week”. This was a rough sketch for one of several spot illustrations to accompany a story in Fade In Magazine about Hollywood talent agents. The assignment was to do a full page and three spots illustrating some of the points interviewed insiders were making about agents and how they operate. This one was rejected as they didn’t understand what I was trying to convey… the idea was to visually demonstrate how agents like to throw money around driving expensive cars, etc. Of course, a BMW Z-3 is hardly a super car, but I like drawing that car.… READ MORE

Cartooning Scholarship Reminder

August 28th, 2007 | Posted in News

It’s “back to school” time! In honor of that, and because I am way too busy right now to write any meaningful blog posts, I am reminding everybody about the scholarships in cartooning that the National Cartoonist Society’s NCS Foundation have available. Again, the scholarships are not tied to a single school or even to an art major. They are about encouraging young artists to pursue careers in cartooning, be they animators, comic book artists, editorial cartoonists, strip cartoonists… you name it. You apply by filling out an application and sending in 5 samples of your cartooning. The amounts and number of scholarships are up… READ MORE

Lord of the Rings Geeking

August 27th, 2007 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!

Despite being a bit swamped with jobs, I took a few moments out of each of the last few days to accomplish a task I’ve been trying to find time to do for some time: import the entire, unabridged audiobook recordings of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings into iTunes and therefore into my iPod. I had previously accomplished this a few years ago, but that was before my researching how to do it properly (and in fact before the proper software was available to do it right in the first place). Additionally, I had used iTunes 5 to import the… READ MORE

Sunday Mailbag

August 26th, 2007 | Posted in Mailbag

Q: When you do those MAD crowd scenes adding the extra’s with the celebrities- have you used people you meet (your mailman, barber, your kids sport coaches, neighbor etc.) as those extra’s in the crowd? I would think it would be fun to tell/hint to those people “hey check out the new MAD I added you in a scene.” A: Yes, I often add people I know into the parodies I do. One of the first and most valuable lessons I learned from the folks at MAD, from Sam Viviano and Nick Meglin in particular, was that I needed to create cohesion in my “art… READ MORE

Death Knell for Blu-Ray?

August 25th, 2007 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!

Remember the format war heating up between competing High Definition disk flavors HD-DVD and Blu-Ray? Back when I blogged about it things were just starting to get going, and as the crucial holiday season approaches the gloves are coming off. Blu-Ray had been enjoying the lead in disk sales at about 2 to 1 over HD-DVD, thanks in large part to the “PS3 effect” and stronger studio support with Fox, Sony, Disney and Lionsgate films being Blu-Ray exclusive versus only Universal being HD-DVD exclusive (other studios produce thier films in both formats). Blu-Ray supported have been crowing victory on AV tech forums and message boards… READ MORE

On the Drawing Board

August 24th, 2007 | Posted in On the Drawing Board

In the freelance world, it’s often feast or famine with regard to work… either you’ve not nothing or you are swamped. Currently I’m edging into the ‘swamped’ department: MAD- Just got a three page job for issue #483. It’s not a movie or TV parody, but it does have a number of caricatures of TV actors involved. A fairly relaxed deadline. I’m working on the roughs right now. As always, I can’t share anything more about it until publication. Workplace poster- My usual monthly job for this client. I love these assignments… they are always different and always a challenge. This month I need to… READ MORE

Harry Potter Sample

August 23rd, 2007 | Posted in General

I drew at Valleyfair on Monday, which was a rainy, cold, crappy day. I didn’t do many live drawings and I forgot my camera anyway, so I have no live drawings to share this time around. I did manage to finally finish that park sample of the Harry Potter kids that I posted the rough for a while back: Simple, but that’s the idea. Again, the samples up on the walls need to be representational (mostly) of the work produced on site. I thought about having sparks shooting up out of Harry’s wand… but that might be too much for the family friendly theme park!… READ MORE