Tom's Mad Blog
January 12th, 2007 | Posted in General
I’ve met some terrific artists through the National Caricaturists Network, and one of the best is a young man named Joe Bluhm. Joe is a tremendously talented illustrator who is one of the best caricaturists I’ve ever seen. He won the NCN’s highest honor, Caricaturist of the Year in his first year of competing and has been busy as a hard working NCN member, both as an officer and editor of their magazine Exaggerated Features, as well as getting his illustration career rolling. Joe recently moved from Orlando and the theme park caricature scene to New York City to work full time for the animation… READ MORE
January 11th, 2007 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!
Tuesday at the MacWorld Expo, Steve Jobs announced the latest Apple products including a new Airport Extreme wireless networking solution using 802.11n, the Apple TV for wireless playback of iTunes content in your living room, and the hotly anticipated iPhone cellular telephone. I’m not that enthusiastic about Apple TV… I find it hard to believe you are going to get a true high definition quality picture from a downloaded file. Popping a disk into a drawer and pressing ‘play’ just doesn’t seem that much work to me to enjoy a movie, nor does the process of renting or buying said disk. I think true on-demand… READ MORE
January 10th, 2007 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Still haven’t seen Blood Diamond. I’ve heard mixed reviews. Here’s one of Leo DiCaprio: I spent a bit more time rendering this one than usual. I’m sorry there hasn’t been much art posted here lately. Mostly I’ve been working on MAD jobs. The powers that be at MAD pointed out to me the other day that even sketches and preliminary drawings done on projects for them are their copyrighted property (MAD is work for hire), and they preferred I did not post any work in advance of the publication of the material in the magazine. I totally understand and respect that, so I will not… READ MORE
January 9th, 2007 | Posted in General
Between the lovely Anna and three teenage daughters, our house is a little heavy in the estrogen department. It’s just myself and my 10 year old son Tommy to hold up grand man traditions like belching out loud, scratching our privates at will and trying to pretend we heard everything the women were saying when we were really watching TV and didn’t even realize they were even talking to us. No easy task but the boy and I do our best. It occurred to me recently that Tommy and I don’t get enough man time, especially in the winter when we can’t go outside and… READ MORE
January 8th, 2007 | Posted in General
A lot of people are interested in digital painting and using the computer for color illustration. I am putting together an extensive tutorial on my line art coloring process, complete with screen capture video, for later this month, so look for that soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the tools I use for digital painting, specifically the Wacom Cintiq and how it differs from the traditional graphics tablet. I took the plunge about 3 years ago, and while I have never regretted it there are a few things I would like to see improved with the Cintiq. For years I… READ MORE
January 7th, 2007 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: How do you structure your time? ( i.e. describe a typical day in life of Tom Richmond.) A: Since I work out of my home, and deadlines dictate a lot in terms of working hours, I have no set daily structure per se. Some days I do mostly paper work or get caught up on e-mailing, accounting or other boring crap. That’s if I don’t have any pressing jobs on the board. If I’ve got jobs to work on, then I try and ignore everything else and do them, but again, working at home makes that hard to do. But, here might be a… READ MORE
January 6th, 2007 | Posted in General
As I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, I listen to audiobooks in the studio when I am inking or coloring illustration work. It helps keep me focused for long periods when I might otherwise get distracted. I might spend 50 plus hours inking and coloring on a 6 or 7 page MAD job… enough time to listen to the entire unabridged Lord of the Rings trilogy! As I also have mentioned before, I can only listen to books I have already read, so I don’t have to spend that much of my attention on it and am able to zone in and out if needed. I… READ MORE
January 5th, 2007 | Posted in General
It weird how things you think and talk about sometimes have a tendency to pop up suddenly again in the oddest places. In the last week or so I wrote about my workout philosophies and routines, and also about how Saturday mornings used to be when I was a kid with competing network lineups of cartoons and other shows aimed at kids. I mentioned Sid and Marty Krofft shows like HR Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost as staples of my generation’s kid experience. Yesterday the lovely Anna showed me a feature story in our local paper entitled “Lords of the Gym”, talking about the… READ MORE
