Tom's Mad Blog
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
November 3rd, 2006 | Posted in MAD Magazine
As I mentioned last week, this Sunday, Nov. 5th I will be appearing at the Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm along with the great Sergio Aragones and writer extraordinaire Mark Evanier…. and David Carradine. If Grasshopper starts to bully me I’ll sick Sergio on him. Nobody messes with Sergio. I’ll have a stack of free MAD magazines to sign while supplies last, and will be doing caricatures and sketches for dirt cheap. Actually I’ll be overcharging, but in L.A. nobody will notice. I’m also going to have a few MAD originals on hand for sale. I… READ MORE
November 2nd, 2006 | Posted in General
I’m pretty busy trying to get caught up in the studio before my trip to LA this weekend, so I came “this close” to posting the Dreaded Deadline Demon today. However I have a new blog to plug, so I thought I’d do a quick post and do so. My lovely and talented wife Anna and I are irrepressible foodies. When we travel we always plan our little trips around the restaurants we plan on visiting. Over the years we’ve been to places like New York, Paris, New Orleans, San Fransisco, Las Vegas, Orlando, Maui and Oahu and a lot of other locales with some… READ MORE
November 1st, 2006 | Posted in General
I’ve mentioned here several times that I don’t watch much TV. Most of the time when MAD assigns me a TV parody I have never watched the show. I always need to get caught up by finding people with taped episodes, renting a previous season on DVD (if it’s not a new show) or setting the TIVO to find repeats. It’s important to get a grasp of the show, it’s characters, plots and idiosyncrasies in order to add that extra something to the art. Just doing caricatures of everybody would be a cop out. That’s why I love the iTunes store. New TV shows get… READ MORE
October 31st, 2006 | Posted in General
Here’s a section of the final art of the “Kim Jong” piece, which I sent off to MAD yesterday to be included in their “20 Dumbest Things of the Year” feature in MAD #473: As I mentioned before, this job entailed a different approach as MAD’s editors wanted a fully painted look to the art, as opposed to “line and color”. In the last 6 months or so, I have been tapped by MAD a few times to do painted pieces for special features, giving me a chance to get away from my usual style. The first of these was a piece about “Rejected Characters… READ MORE
