Steven D. Jackson

Zoiks! It’s the Mystery Inc team!  Had a lot of fun remaking the design of the characters, loving the ‘Adventure time’esk style to Shaggy and love how Velma looks too! 

I thought I’d like to post this piece of artwork as I’ve not produced any environmental art recently. 

In 2014 I had the incredible pleasure of being able to meet Tonko Houses’ Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi at The Annecy Film Festival as The Dam Keeper was playing within the festival. As an animation graduate, a utter fan of Pixar I had no doubt that getting to see these two would be an absolute dream during the Festival!

I’ve been following the work of Tonko House for a few years and able to see their body of work form into an epic little hub of talent and creativity. The style of Tonko House is unique and touching. It personally reaches out to their audience and it’s such captivating and special thing to see. The fan base is huge and there is no surprise. They have a rich quality, a deep understanding of pain and emotion; peeling back the behind the walls to show raw honest feelings through the play and use of loveable, cute characters and colour. The guys at Tonko have an incredible attention to detail through the medium of light & dark with an impeccable sense of narrative.

From their success of The Dam Keeper which had won many global animation festival awards, The Dam Keeper was nominated for an Oscar in 2015 under the ‘Best animated short film’ category but unfortunately lost out to Disney’s Feast. The Dam Keeper is set to be developed into a 120 minute feature length film, a production of 3 part Graphic novels and has also been developed into a TV series with credits to Erick Oh for a Japanese series aimed for children titled, ‘The Dam Keeper Poems’ and have also produced another short film based on a story written by a Japanese author called Genki Kawamura titled ‘Moom’ which is also doing incredibly well within the Animation festivals.

The guys at Tonko house are constantly producing new work, raising incredible amount of money for charities in the USA and Japan, constantly take on new challenges and very versatile with new ideas. They hold regular podcasts and interviews with other like-minded professionals who are also in the industry and always strive to develop the work of students, professionals and other level-skilled artists skills through platforms like Schoolism workshops and online tutorials via Youtube.