Tom's Mad Blog
November 11th, 2006 | Posted in General
I finally got a chance to catch up on “LOST” last night. That meant watching last week’s episode from the TIVO and then this week’s “live”. Regular readers might remember me rambling about the season premiere a month or so ago, where I questioned if the show was going anywhere or if it was meandering around trying to draw things out without any appreciable plot advancements. First off, what the hell is a “Fall Finale“??? I have never heard of that. The next scheduled new episode of LOST will air on February 7th, 2007… ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? We have had a total of five… READ MORE
November 10th, 2006 | Posted in General
No, I haven’t left Anna for a weekend with hotel heiress Paris Hilton. Paris won’t return my phone calls. Actually, I’d be afraid if I got too close to her Paris might fatally stab me with one of her shoulder blades anyway. Nope. As a gift for Anna’s 40th birthday (and our 18th anniversary) I arranged a long weekend trip to Paris just for the two of us. We’ll be dining at some incredible restaurants, seeing some museums and famous sights, and hanging out with long-time MAD artist Rick Tulka, and his wife Brenda. Rick and Brenda moved to Paris over 10 years ago from… READ MORE
November 9th, 2006 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
Without a MAD job on the board, I’m actually getting caught up on a bunch of jobs. Here are the finals of the “Nader vs. GM” project for the American Museum of Tort Law. These final images will be printed at the outrageous size of 36″ x 60″. Each ‘page’ has areas that will contain inset elements like an actual copy of Ralph Nader‘s “Unsafe at Any Speed” book, newspaper articles, informational text and video monitors. Thus there are ‘dead spaces’ and unfinished areas to accommodate these separate elements. I expect a final round of revisions on this, as Nader has had comments all along… READ MORE
November 8th, 2006 | Posted in General
A few weeks ago I wrote a short article about the great Jack Davis on the eve of this receiving yet another award for his brilliant work and career. This one came from the Comic Art Professional Society, and part of the festivities included the presentation of a book made up of tribute drawings for Jack by admiring and grateful cartoonists, myself included. A week or so after the event I received a booklet entitled “Jack Davis: A CAPS Tribute” in the mail which must have served as the evening’s program. Among other contents it had a terrific article/bio of Jack by long-time MAD editor… READ MORE
November 7th, 2006 | Posted in General
Now that I am (more or less) caught up in the studio, I can post a report about my trip to the L.A. Comic Con. First, I was very sorry I could not spend at least a few days in L.A. I think that would be a fascinating place to explore. Instead it was a whirlwind visit, flying in at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday and catching a 6:30 p.m flight out on Sunday. That did not leave much time for sightseeing. However when I agreed to attend I knew that unless I did it as a quick visit I would end up regretting the time… READ MORE
November 6th, 2006 | Posted in General
But… I’ll have to put of the convention report until tomorrow… READ MORE
November 5th, 2006 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: When you transfer drawings from your sketches to the “official board” MAD sends you… do you just redraw the whole thing or what do you do? A: I physically redraw it, but considering I don’t draw the roughs very detailed it’s more of a tightening and completing than it is total redrawing. Here’s the process: I do the sketches at print size, directly on the MAD layouts like so: Then I scan them into PhotoShop. I enlarge them to 200% of the original size, which makes them the exact size of the boards MAD sends me. I print them on my Epson Color Stylus… READ MORE
November 4th, 2006 | Posted in General
Off to smoggy Los Angeles. I’ll have a report from the trip on Monday… In the meantime, though the miracle of post-dated blog technology, there will be a new installment of the ever popular Sunday Mailbag tomorrow. This month I intend to do a full color tutorial on digitally coloring an illustration in PhotoShop. I’ve had good intentions to do a more thorough one for some time now, but I’ve come to some stark realizations over the months since I did the “mini coloring tutorial“. The first was that I cannot do a tutorial using an actual freelance job. This is because by the time… READ MORE
