Tom's Mad Blog
May 6th, 2007 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: The splash pages for your MAD parodies are full of Caricature illustrations/bodies, all set around a relevant scene and I wonder how you go about working out these scenes and where you start with the first pencil lines that will go to make up these scenes? Which by the way are awesome! A: First off, thanks for the kind words! Splash pages are particularly complex. They are like puzzles that need to be figured out and solved. The layouts I receive from MAD include the headers and all the text boxes in place. I also get a script with some descriptions or explanations of… READ MORE
May 5th, 2007 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, quick sketch and value study for a possible park sample. My old Snoop drawing needs replacing. Since I’m planning on doing a fair amount of live drawing this year, I’d like to come up with 12 new samples. Ordinarily I’d pick new subjects but Snoop is still relative and a better example of him is in order. READ MORE
May 4th, 2007 | Posted in General
Birthdays seem to pile up faster and faster the older you get. I’m forty one today, but in the immortal words of Indiana Jones… “It’s not the years, Honey… it’s the mileage.” Back in 1989 I became a manager for a caricature concession company at the tender age of 23. I was roughly the same age as the artists I trained and younger than some. At 25 I owned my own caricature businesses and got a lot of funny looks from people when they were told I was the owner of the business. A few years ago I officially contracted an artist to draw caricatures… READ MORE
May 3rd, 2007 | Posted in General
Did you know the long anticipated “Spider-Man III” opens tomorrow in a theater near you? You did? Maybe you’ve seen one or two of the “tie ins” being pimped by everyone from cell phone companies to fast food chains to TV cable services. It’s sure to be a blockbuster. Maybe it’s time to buy some stock in Marvel Entertainment? Not according to this interesting article on “The Spider-Man Trade”, a phenomenon that shows how fast money stock traders drive the price of Marvel stock up when a Spider-Man film is about to be released, and then it nose dives by as much as 50% just… READ MORE
May 2nd, 2007 | Posted in General
I’m finally back from Massachusetts, where I spent several days working at my operations at Six Flags New England. It always takes a few weekends to get the bugs worked out of the young season. I spent some time drawing but most of it teaching some of our new artists our techniques with caricature and airbrush. I’ll be back there again May 18th-20th. The operation in Six Flags New England is by far my largest, with two big caricature, three airbrush tattoo and one (pending) airbrush T-shirt location. The caricature booths we designed and built there are some of the best in any park in… READ MORE
May 1st, 2007 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!
The next generation of DVD format war is just heating up, with Sony‘s Blu-Ray and Toshiba‘s HD-DVD still in it’s retail infancy. The upcoming holiday season will be the first real indicator of which one will end up the dominant format, but it may be a year or to before anything is really decided. Clearly high definition is the format of the near future to replace the aging standard DVD. For now early adopters and home theater enthusiasts have their choice of any number of Blu-Ray players from several manufacturers, or the Toshiba line of HD DVD players (I went over many of the differences… READ MORE
April 30th, 2007 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Sculpture by MADman Hermann Mejia MAD artist Hermann Mejia has finally gotten a website up showcasing his incredible work. Check it out here. Hermann has been working for MAD for quite some time now, and from the beginning his art was something special. He used to do a feature called “Celebrity cause of Death Betting Odds”, where he illustrated a tombstone with a crazy caricature/statue integrated into it to accompany the odds of various ways the celebrity might met their end. That was a great little feature and made greater by Hermann’s fantastic art. Eventually he started doing parodies of films and TV shows as… READ MORE
April 29th, 2007 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: I have unsuccessfully searched the web and several art books on the simple topic of Inkwashing. I would like to know the technique for preparing the wash. Do you mix the ink and water ad hock as you are using it, or do you measure out 1 or 2 drops per ounce of water into several containers and create your own solutions for use later on? I have arbitrarily made some batches but it seems to me there must be some standard procedures?? A: I don’t do a lot of ink and wash illustrations anymore as it’s so much easier to just add the… READ MORE
