Tom's Mad Blog
September 6th, 2006 | Posted in General
Hoo boy. This Minnesota Twins Pirahna shirt project is really getting messy. Major League Baseball… they have a lot of lawyers with a lot of time on their hands. If it ever comes to an end, I promise I’ll tell the whole story. It’ll be a good lesson in several points about freelancing, including the virtues of patience and how some clients get just as caught up in issues out of their control as illustrators do. Hopefully it will all come out okay in the end. READ MORE
September 6th, 2006 | Posted in General
Last May I turned the big 4-0. I can’t say I was too broken up about it. In fact I had no problem with it at all. I like being 40. I’ve got a wonderful family, a career I love, and I’ve got my health. I got lucky with the first one but had to work hard for the last two. Can anyone ask for more than that? I also had a birthday bash for the ages, at a trendy downtown Minneapolis restaurant with about 70 of my friends and family. Well, I really don’t have any friends and my family doesn’t like me much,… READ MORE
September 5th, 2006 | Posted in General
Thanksgiving? Please… all that turkey and even more dishes to wash. Halloween? Spandex makes me itchy. Christmas? That’s not even Jesus’s real birthday, nobody knows that date for sure. No, the best day of the year is today… the Day After Labor Day!!! Why, you say? Well, it’s probably not as significant to most people as it is to me. I think you’d need to have worked for as many years as I have in a seasonal theme park to get what I mean. It’s true I do not work out at the parks anywhere near as much as I used to, but for about… READ MORE
September 4th, 2006 | Posted in General
I don’t get much time to read, and when I do it’s a luxury I am grateful for. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks in the studio, at least at certain phases of a job, but the actual cracking of a book is mainly reserved for vacations, long flights and the occasional (and highly rare) downtime. I while ago I wrote about Stephen King, and how he is one of the authors I most enjoy reading and listening to his work on audiobook. Another author who falls into that category for me is Fredrick Forsyth. Forsyth is considered one of (if not THE)… READ MORE
September 3rd, 2006 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: Do you go about drawing the kind of caricatures like the ones in MAD the same way you would in a theme park where you start with the eyes, nose, etc and work your way from the inside out? A: No, I do it totally different in the studio for one main reason: I can. Working in a theme park or any live caricature setting is very different from doing it in a studio. When you work live you are under a time constraint, and you need to draw it quickly and efficiently. Live caricature is a reactive form of drawing, meaning you don’t… READ MORE
September 2nd, 2006 | Posted in General
Yesterday morning I was at the Mall of America pushing a two wheel cart loaded with boxes of heavy glass frames to deliver to my caricature booth in the “Park at MOA” (formerly Camp Snoopy), when I am suddenly confronted by a sure sign that civilization as we know it is coming to an end. Coming towards me through the amusement park part of the mall is a security guard. That’s not unusual, the place is crawling with them anytime you don’t need one, and I didn’t need one at the time. It would have been odd had I been looking for one at that… READ MORE
September 1st, 2006 | Posted in On the Drawing Board
Looks like the “Little Piranha” Minnesota Twins shirts are a go. There??ᬨ‚Ćwere some interesting issues stemming from the use of the other team logos in the art, but that’s what the Twins wanted and they have to assume liability for the use of an image they both specifically commissioned and purchased the copyrights to.??ᬨ‚ĆSounds like Major League Baseball signed off on it and there may be shirts out by the end of this weekend. Hard to believe they can put something together that fast, but anything is possible. Here are the final art images for the shirt: The back design The front (small pocket image)… READ MORE
August 31st, 2006 | Posted in Freelancing
Working as a freelance illustrator is never boring. While the majority of the jobs I do work out fine in the end, with a few kinks thrown in here and there, sometimes jobs go bad and end up being total nightmares. These usually stem from expectations being unrealistic or just plain wrong on either my part or the part of the client. Over the years I’ve gotten better at sniffing out these potential disasters but some still slip through the cracks. Occasionally I’ll tell some of the stories of these freelance nightmares here, as they often have some entertainment value. When appropriate, I will change… READ MORE
