Sunday Monday Mailbag

Q: Tom, have you ever drawn any cartoons in a style other than the caricature style you do for ” MAD?”
Do you have a “History and Development of Tom Richmond’s Drawing Style?”

A: I guess that depends on how you define “style”.

One way to define style would be the technique or medium being used on a given piece of art. In that respect, I do have a few different styles I work in. There’s my line and color style that is what I principally use for my work in MAD:

Then I have the colored line style, which had a softer and more painterly look:

And my fully painted work, which has no real lines:

I suppose you can also call my crosshatched pencil work or ink and wash stuff different styles as well:

Personally, I do not define “style” as mere differences in rendering. I look at an artist’s style as the way they think and draw…which is mostly independent of rendering technique. By that definition, I don’t have more than one style. It’s all the way I draw, with different window dressing on top.

That’s not to say that some artists don’t work in different styles. I know a few who have such radically different styles (realistic painting vs. extreme cartoon work) that they literally market themselves as two different artists so art directors don’t get confused or think they are getting someone who is a “jack of all trades, master of none”.

As for a history of the development of my drawing style, I do not have any kind of record like that nor any idea of how I would put one together. I see evolution in my work not just year to year but sometimes job to job. I will say that the majority of my style of drawing was devleoped doing live caricatures for 20 years at various theme parks around the country.