Tom's Mad Blog
August 27th, 2006 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: How do you scan your inked originals for coloring in PhotoShop? A: I have an oversized flatbed scanner, the Microtek 9800XL, which has a live scan area of 12 inches by 17 inches. Even with the large bed,??ᬨ‚Ćmy pages are often??ᬨ‚Ćbigger than this, so I scan??ᬨ‚Ćthem in sections and piece??ᬨ‚Ćthem together in PhotoShop. Most of the time I ink my drawings at 150% of the size they print at, and in the case of MAD work it’s at 200% (MAD tradition). The poster image I inked for the inking tutorial, for example, had a print size of 17 x 17 inches. Those posters are… READ MORE
August 26th, 2006 | Posted in General
I get questioned a lot about the state of MAD movie parodies, usually from people lamenting them as shorter, less frequent and sometimes weaker than the ones in the past. There was a time when the latest issue of MAD could be counted on to have at least one movie parody and one TV show parody in it, and often more than one. The parodies averaged over 6 pages in length, and the targets were usually highly regarded dramas and films that were either critically acclaimed, box office hits or both. Artsy, off the wall films like “A Clockwork Orange” got the MAD treatment as… READ MORE
August 25th, 2006 | Posted in General
A few days ago I added a new category of post called “Tutorials” in an attempt to allow readers to easily find these features without the need for a cumbersome search. It turns out that isn’t the best solution, as it will eventually require people to click over multiple pages to find what they are looking for. Instead, I have added two new “Pages” to the blog. WordPress, the excellent blog program I use here, has a nice feature where you can create web pages within the blog for whatever purpose you want. The links to these pages are at the top of the blogroll… READ MORE
August 25th, 2006 | Posted in General
It’s not too often I add links to my blogroll or recommend any websites, because… well… there are lot of really good ones and if I linked to them all that’s all I’d have time to do! That said, there are a few I’ve recently come across that have become musts on the “visit every day” list for me I thought I’d share. Drawn! is, in it’s own words, a “collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw.”??ᬨ‚ĆPopulated with contributions from a number of terrific artists including fellow NCS member Jay Stephens, Drawn! is filled with links to great sites, blogs,… READ MORE
August 24th, 2006 | Posted in General
A long time ago a friend of mine showed me a photocopy of a collection of comic book style panels called “Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work!”. Supposedly put together by the legendary Wood, they showed 22 different panel designs that could be used at almost any time within a comic book story to help give a boring “talking heads” part of a script some visual interest. I thought it was pretty smart. For years I’d been looking for a copy of it. In the last week it’s been getting a lot of circulation on the Internet on cartoon and comic blogs and forums,… READ MORE
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
