Lil wedding logos for Melissa's buisness
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The Cropping of Capricorn
I recently had the honour of winning the 'Artist Choice Award'
at Urban Chalk Art Festival 2011
It was a great event again and some amazing talent. A great opportunity to spend
3 days with the public and fellow artists.
Biography: Attack of the Teddybugs
Finally, my life story....
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In Attack of the Teddybugs, Jason Howe finally tells
the story of how he came to love - to liberate
- to celebrate nature’s rejects. From his Fine Arts
education, through his early days in publishing to
collaborations with and Studio Ghibli and Pixar Studios,
Howe invites us to see through the worlds he has
created into his workshop and his life.
The Teddybugs’ unprecedented following began with Howe’s
first book, Benky, in 2013. From there it was a short step to his
acclaimed book Wave Caves and to his first feature film,
Clarice’s Rainbow.
Howe’s Teddybugs stormed the shelves of bookshops in 2013. Within
two short years, they had conquered the hearts of readers worldwide.
With their fragility and resilience, these beautiful monsters are loved
not only by millions of children but also by the adults who read to them.
‘Jason Howe stirs the emotions of readers around the world...’
Hayao Miyazaki, director of Spirited Away
‘Jason evokes nostalgia for the playfulness of cartoons through complex
characterisation...’
John Lasseter, founder Pixar Studios
‘My kids can’t get enough of the Teddybugs.’
Alice Cooper
Mid Life Crisis
'Mid Life Crisis' oil & acrylic on canvas
The milkbar down the road from my childhood home had only one stand-up arcade game: Wonder Boy. With his stumpy legs and a grin that never budged, Wonder Boy shuffled through that flat landscape on quest after quest to rescue his eternally-endangered girlfriend. My mate and I learned to make 20c last a long time on that machine, guiding our hero through the various perils of the game with the aid of a fairy, some magic fruit and, of course, a skateboard.
So for me, when it came to choosing a game to celebrate as part of Bleeding Heart Gallery's Emulator, there was no competition.
But Emulator is an exhibition celebrating more than the 8-bit games themselves; it's also about the nostalgia we feel for them, our fondness for the pixilated pastimes we once had. So my Wonder Boy is, like many people who were kids in the 80s, a bloke who's not as young as he used to be but is still young at heart. With a new set of wheels, this is a thirty-something Wonder Boy who is glad to get back in the action.
The intensity and narrowness of the palate available to 1980s game designers was something I really enjoyed. In acknowledgement of that aesthetic, I have imposed cartoon-style figures in oil paint on a photo-naturalistic acrylic background, using the contrast of form, colour and materials to signify the juxtaposition this ageing Wonder Boy feels: the disused world of an 80s-style suburbia comes alive with superimposed icons from the game as, having thrown his axe at the right egg again after all these years, Wonder Boy rediscovers the brightness of his youth.
With many of the characters from the original Wonder Boy and nods to some of the great 8-bit games, this painting takes Wonder Boy to a new level.
Wonder Boy- the making of 'Mid Life Crisis'
Emulator was held at Bleeding Heart Gallery in September 2011.
The exhibition showcased a number of emerging and established artists from all over Australia.
These artists looked to create their homage to characters, landscapes and levels of our favourite 8-bit, 16-bit and classic arcade games.
I chose Wonder Boy and decided to put him in a realistic setting.
FOOMPTY DOOMPS & THE FEATHERED WHIRL-WRANGER
This piece exemplifies my longstanding interest in the possibilities of combining the cuddly with the grotesque. It is part of my series of “Teddybugs” and, like many of them, grew from a spontaneous sketch to become a highly refined piece.
Essential to my process is an appreciation
for strong composition and organic shapes. So, though pieces such as this
develop from doodles in an apparently unplanned way, they are founded on
technical cornerstones such as colour and form.
In varying from my regular practice of
sketching thumbnails to draw this vignette to scale, my awareness of the
specialist aspects of drawing were heightened. And it was in this
headspace that I reconsidered the challenge of drawing fur.
Fibrous filaments, clumped yet separate,
strands and stubble … fur is one of those things which is only appealing in
certain contexts: on the body of something we love it draws our hand; off that
body and in balls on the floor – or in our food – nothing can be worse.
‘Foompty Doomps’ is essentially an animated
furball, a creature whose lack of physical definition is symbolic of the fact
that it is beyond any definition itself. I perceive it to be somewhat
doleful – perhaps bullied – and, like so many shy people, it hides behind its
fur. Paradoxically, however, though it cowers from the viewer, it still
has courage to make eye contact and seems to implore for connection. In
contrast, the ‘Wispy-Wranger’ in the top right of the frame sneers a little,
perhaps believing it is ‘above’ both the ground-hugging fur-ball below it and
the viewer. None the less, there’s something honest and brave about
‘Foompty’, something intrinsically likeable, and if you had to pick one of them
to be your friend, it wouldn’t be a tough decision.
Evoking empathy in a viewer by enlarging
certain features of a figure is as old as characature itself; animators and
character designers distort and distend every part of a figure’s appearance in
order to elicit an emotional response. So, in experimenting with
proportion in the creation of these fantastical creatures, I looked for new
ways to make ugly forms endearing. It is the combination of foompty’s pudgy
fluff and focused eyes which make it such a successful character, demonstrating
that, though the body of a figure may seem formless in some respects, clarity
of character is as simple as getting the eyes right.
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