Today we’d like to introduce you to Bear Howe.
Hi Bear, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Young Illustrators Studio opened in January 2025, following nearly a decade of my own studio practice, which included teaching hundreds of adults, teens and kids. I didn’t set out to be a teacher, but what grew was a way toward building frustration resilience, growth mindset and confidence that radiates out into every other aspect of life through project-based art making. We teach multi-layered, complicated art concepts through fun projects, so hard-to-learn skills build overtime. Perfectionism can’t survive long because the tone we set is full of acceptance, freedom to dream up the worlds we want, express frustration, and an openness to trying again and again with no shame or comparison. Students build self-esteem by seeing their progress, and feel a sense of satisfaction from achieving goals they set for themselves.
It all started with people asking here and there if I could give them or their kids art lessons, which felt right up my ally because I love sharing and talking about art and I already volunteered teaching art at my kids’ school. I eventually added a class for kids at Crooked Tree Arts Center, too. And then the pandemic hit.
My partner and I got very sick in March of 2020, and spent a scary year first unable to access the care we needed and then being told by doctors we couldn’t possibly “still” be sick from Covid. That year I was pretty much disabled. By the next year, though, my lung capacity had improved enough for me to talk through a couple classes a week, so when a friend reached out and told me that a mutual friend was having a lot of success teaching online, I decided to check it out! (Her website is here, if you could link to her: https://www.amaliaexplores.com/ ) Amalia helped me get started with online classes, and we even collaborated on an art class that would match her science and animal class. Within a couple of years, my schedule was packed with as many classes as I could teach, while still giving me enough time to keep a studio practice and not be in constant inflammation flare-up.
Young Illustrators Studio officially got started because I like to keep my classes relatively small and I was getting a lot of requests I couldn’t say yes to, and I knew working with a team meant I could get sick and have other teachers who could sub for me instead of interrupting classes! So I reached out to a few artist friends in the kidlit world to ask if they’d want to teach a class or two, and the rest is history!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
One big challenge is how to engage in ethical, effective marketing in a landscape of intense attention economy that encourages manipulation, exaggeration and predatory offers. Additionally, navigating online marketplace algorithms run by CEOs and Shareholders who care more about profit than helping real people is challenging. It’s always a challenge to balance the creative and business sides.
Most of our classes are held online via Zoom, which allows us to reach kids all over the world, and with less barriers to access for so many kids and families! But it does plant us firmly in the online market, competing with the entire internet, which often feels overwhelming.
I don’t think any roads are smooth, but some successes are even better because it was hard to get there (like finally understanding how to draw hands!). So we are building our online presence one brick at a time!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am personally an artist, author and arts educator living in Michigan, born in New York and raised mostly in Pennsylvania. I use a wide range of media in fine art and illustration to explore the intersections of mystery, wonder, belonging, hope and liberation in relationship to place, history and ecologies. I love nature, science and history; and I’m known for my abstract landscapes with tiny figures in them, Kidlit art, murals, animal art and art classes at YIS! I also post thoughts on art and life and art prompts at BecomingArt.Substack.com.
I think YIS is different because:
1. Every class is taught by a professional, working artist
2. We are committed to progressive, inclusive and brave classrooms and curriculum
3. We have fun while building complicated and hard skills
4. Families can access us from so many places around the world from their own homes
5. We believe in excellence that is not arrived at by putting others down, comparison or old beliefs about whose voices are more or less important
6. We give kids a place to be themselves, learn how to trust themselves and help guide them toward being open-hearted, helpful, fair and courageous people who believe in art as one way to happiness and satisfaction for the rest of their lives.
I grew up in a poor and conservative household full of undiagnosed ADHDers. We had a lot of our own problems, but being innovative and creative about how to get things done or following what brings you joy weren’t any of them. I learned how to pivot, try again, find another way, not care about the status quo, that change can be exciting and to believe in helping others early on in a scrappy kind of way. I never went to art school, but I took all those great life lessons, dumped the harmful ones, and built a career that allows me to be a lifelong learner, stay curious and creative, be flexible around my health and family, move a lot, play and help others. I know what it feels like to shake loose from old stories and limitations, hold many realities true at once and to grow as a person with art as a companion. Young people need to do this for themselves for a long time, but as we get older I’ve learned that this has all been in service to becoming a better helper to others. I believe in every single person’s ability to learn art skills and find themselves growing because of art.
You can find my personal original paintings and prints for sale periodically throughout the year at my website, bearhowe.com.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
Yes, absolutely! There is an entire ecosystem of support for my own art practice, which gives me the continuing education and experience to have something to teach.
First and always, my family: my partner, Daniel, has believed in my work and my ability to navigate the challenges of having your own business (he has his own business, Enthrive North, as a licensed, clinical social worker). He has worked really hard to build Enthrive North, and subsidized me getting off my feet in the first few years. Without that privilege I could not have had the freedom to develop YIS! And our two kids, Emma and Sayber, who, along with Daniel, have always been a source of the joyful, playful and open-hearted presence that led to the growth I needed to become an artist.
YIS is fortunate to be supported by thousands of past and current students and families, many of whom stay for years, and take the time to tell me how our classes have changed them and how proud they are. All of these little moments are like glowing fireflies in the hazy twilight of navigating art as a business, keeping me connected to why this work matters. Especially at a time when being such an abstract person can feel so useless in helping our very hurt world.
I didn’t have a single actual art skill when I set out to do all of this. I took my first art classes since high school with Glenn Wolf at NMC. Glenn always treated me like an artist and helped me believe it too. Even when I could see my skills were no where close to his, he made me believe they could be. And throughout the many workshops, conferences, mentorships and friendships I found through the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, YIS (before it was YIS) was growing. Kirbi Fagan mentored me through a huge growth period in my skill building. Her ability to communicate complicated art concepts in bite-sized critiques of my work, over and over again until things clicked, is something I strive to do for every one of my students, when they are ready! The way Vanessa Brantley-Newton brought me into the fold of her tiny illustrators group over a workshop weekend when I was clearly light-years behind every other participant, giving me the chance to really study what everyone there was doing, ask questions and believe I should keep going. Kristi Wodeck and Brian Iler at Crooked Tree Arts Center gave me the chance to teach classes and my first solo art show. Their unwavering respect for the arts, and acceptance of me fitting into this world, have taught me so much about what helping artists can look like.
I can only teach the way I do because of this ecosystem, and the networks of so many people not named here who continue to teach me, support me, critique my work and remind me all the time why we do this.
Pricing:
- • Weekly online digital art classes: $18-$25
- • Weekly online drawing classes: $18-$25
- • Weekly online painting classes: $18-$25
- • On-Demand digital art classes: $9-24
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.YoungIllustratorsStudio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youngillustratorsstudio
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YoungIllustratorsStudio/
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@youngillustratorsstudio
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@YoungIllustratorsStudio
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/YoungIllustratorsStudio/
