Tom Taggart: Making Monsters and Mischief

A man of many talents and skills, artist Tom Taggart is creating monsters and myths. Tom has a long list of artistic experience, including comic book covers (including Batman, Swamp Thing, and Doom Patrol), toy fabrication, movie sets, mini-golf design, and more. A New Jersey native, he currently lives in North Carolina.   Self-taught, Tom stands out because he always puts his own take on characters. He loves coming up with this own designs and stories. When he was younger, he didn't think he could make art his career. His friend Dave Devries (author of "The Monster Engine") helped him realize that art could be his career.  Tom is creating bookshelf monsters, a natural progression of his clocks.  These are one-of-kind monsters sculpted into boxes, that can be displayed in between books a shelf. The monsters love to reach outside their barriers. They may transport us to another dimension.   Tom is a fan of classic horror, fantasy, and science fiction. There is a beauty to old monsters – they are metaphors, showing us things you cannot show with human characters. His latest bookshelf monster was inspired by the 1950s Vincent Price movie, "The Fly." To Tom, there's just something funny about a man with a fly-head.   Tom shares his processes and techniques online. He offers painting and sculpting workshops in his studio. Tom is a strong advocate for other artists. He created a group on Facebook, The Troll Market, for artists to help each other and promote each other's work. Tell the artists in your life that you appreciate them.   Tom has a wide-variety of non-art related job experience also, including cheese consultant, pool boy, nursery worker, and movie usher.  He could write a book on how fun it was to work in a theater.  He and his coworkers enjoyed reenacting the end scene of the movie "Footloose."   One of Tom's fantasies is to create an art-based haunted house. He would get his art friends together to make a spooky house – with cool art, monsters, and more. Each artist would be given a room to go wild. One room might have all tentacles, the next a gothic design, a funny one, etc. We'd love to see this fantasy come to life someday.   Here's where to find him:  https://www.patreon.com/tomtaggart/  instagram.com/tom.taggart.146  etsy.com/shop/tomtaggart  Visit the podcast web site at https://www.halloweenartandtravel.com