Tom's Mad Blog
September 10th, 2006 | Posted in Freelancing
Q: How much should I charge for an illustration? A: I get individual e-mails occasionally asking for advice on what to charge on this project or that kind of job, and the problem is that the question in basically unanswerable. It is always “that depends”. By the letter of the law the discussion of how much to charge for the same kind of service or product between two competing sources of said service or product is called “price fixing”, and is quite illegal in the United States. Realistically there needs to be someplace to begin for illustrators just getting into the business. For those people… READ MORE
September 9th, 2006 | Posted in General
Well, the Piranha shirts are finally done and on the racks. It was quite a struggle to get them out, and ultimately the Minnesota Twins had to give up on what we felt was an integral part of the design in order to just get them done. A lot happened over the last week between Major League Baseball, the Twins, myself and the printers of the shirts, but the bottom line was that we couldn’t get the proper approval from MLB and each team in order to go with the original design. Here’s the timeline and various steps that happened. At first I worked directly… READ MORE
September 8th, 2006 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Here’s another image and story from the Wall of Shame. For infrequent visitors, the Wall of Shame is an area just outside my studio where I have framed prints of some of my artwork signed by some of the subjects I have caricatured in them. Every once and a while someone connected with a show or movie sees the parody in MAD and wants to buy the originals. Part of the purchase price is a promise to get some signatures on an oversized print of the splash page. It doesn’t always work out, but sometimes it does and I’ve got a few of these prints… READ MORE
September 7th, 2006 | Posted in General
After all the hoola surrounding Katie Couric yesterday, I got the bug to draw her and did this quick sketch last night while endlessly printing out Anna’s birthday invitations. I might have to turn it into a park sample if she survives in her new job doing the CBS Evening News. She has a great face??ᬨ‚Ćfor caricature. Unusually sharp features for a woman, with an enormous toothy and gum-filled mouth that is quite crooked when it’s a real smile and not the publicity shot version. She has quite an under bite to the right also. Very thin lips, and her eyelashes stick out at all… READ MORE
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
