Tom's Mad Blog
August 23rd, 2006 | Posted in MAD Magazine
Here’s the final colored art of the piece I inked for the inking tutorial: I hate using photshop tricks like I did rendering the grass on this one, but sometimes you just have to do it. I took only a few minutes compared to who-knows-how-long if I went in and painted blades of grass. Even using the Rubber Stamp tool it would have taken hours more to render that field of grass. It looks a little out of place in my opinion but the art director and client loved it, so what do I know????ᬨ‚Ć Also, here’s one of the panels from that Mel Gibson… READ MORE
August 23rd, 2006 | Posted in General
I’ve gotten many positive responses to the modest tutorials I’ve posted so far on the blog… thanks to those who took the time to tell me they appreciated them. I plan on doing more in the future, including a much more involved one on??ᬨ‚Ćdigital coloring. It occurred to me that as time goes on these tutorials will get buried in the archives of the blog and become tough to find unless someone bookmarked a permalink to each of them. So, I have created a new ‘category’ called “Tutorials” for them. They will now be very easy to find anytime, just click on the category link… READ MORE
August 23rd, 2006 | Posted in MAD Magazine
MAD might not have anywhere near the circulation it did in it’s heyday (what magazine does these days??) but there is still a special place in some people’s hearts for MAD that gets them very enthusiastic about getting made fun of in it’s pages. Michael J. Fox was once quoted as saying he knew he’d “made it” as an actor when he was drawn by Mort Drucker in MAD. Usually the MAD movie and TV parodies I’m lucky enough to illustrate see print and nothing more comes of it, but every once and awhile one of the people connected with a show that gets lampooned… READ MORE
August 22nd, 2006 | Posted in Tutorials
Continuing with our inking tutorial, we are still concentrating on the central figure on the illustration. After switching to the pen I have started adding more details and lines to the drawing. The pen is great for building up forms, wrinkles and starting to add some values to the figure. I will go back and forth between a brush and pen for a while, but evenually it will be almost all pen work. There are plenty of things to think about with inking, like form, light, shadow, contrast, etc. It can seem very complex and there is certainly too much to go over here, but… READ MORE
August 21st, 2006 | Posted in Tutorials
When I first got serious about cartooning for a career, one of the things I was most concerned about was inking. That seemed to me like a skill and art that would take a really long time to master, and worse yet there seemed to be no good sources of learning the art of inking out there. I found one book I still heartily recommend, called The Art of Comic Book Inking by Gary Martin, which is to date the best book on the subject. There used to be a great website on inking with input from many great inkers but I think it’s defunct.… READ MORE
August 20th, 2006 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What is the weirdest/strangest/craziest live caricature(s) that you’ve had to draw? A: This question comes from Trevour Meyer, a live caricaturist from North Dakota. He relayed this story of his weirdest live drawing: I just drew one this past weekend down in Austin- a young Hispanic lady, CRYING!??ᬨ‚Ć She didn’t speak very much English, but her group of friends asked me if I could draw her ‘beautiful,’ but with tears going down her face.??ᬨ‚Ć Fair enough, I said.??ᬨ‚Ć But then she began to produce REAL tears as I started the drawing. And she had the most sad look on her face the whole time.… READ MORE
August 19th, 2006 | Posted in MAD Magazine
One of the two pieces I’ve got for MAD right now will be my first contribution to the “Fundalini Pages”. This is a new(er) feature in MAD that I really think is a nice addition to the magazine. It’s usually 3 pages right at the beginning, and contains gag strips, single panel jokes, list gags and other short content that together make a quick-hit kind of humor section. It’s great in that it caters somewhat to the short attention span of the age 10-16 section of the audience, and gets a lot of different artists and writers into the issue with contributions that are good… READ MORE
August 18th, 2006 | Posted in News
The Great Neck Art Center is having an exhibit of original cartoon artwork at their gallery from August 12- October 1, 2006. I have two pieces in the show, the original splash pages from the “Batman Begins” and “Medium” parodies. The show features some great art by some terrific cartoonists. To name just a few: Sy Barry (The Phantom), Mort Drucker (Mad Magazine), Hy Eisman (Popeye), Stan Goldberg (Archie), Bunny Hoest(TheLockhorns), Arnie Levin (The New Yorker), Mike Lynch (Wall Street Journal), Don Orehek (Playboy), Rina Piccolo (Tina’s Groove) and many more. Check out this link to see some pictures of the show on cartoonist Mike… READ MORE
