woodland murals

if you like beavers and giraffes, and happy smiley vegetables, then this blog post is going to make you happy...

the Land of Le Beef was recently commissioned by Woodland (Hong Kong's top preschool, with 10 great locations throughout the city) to create not one, but two murals at their Waterfall school in Pokfulam.

this of course was a big beefy project (these would be my largest illustrations to date*). i knew that the murals would not only need be super awesome and fun to look at, but also needed to be educational, and inspire the children to do great things with their lives.

i sat down at my desk, pencil in hand, and started drafting what would become the greatest thing since the Sistine Chapel. below are the results.

fruits and vegetables - rough sketch and coloured draft

hippo, mouse, giraffe, beaver - rough sketch and coloured draft

fruits and vegetables - in progress, and finished piece

hippo, mouse, giraffe, beaver - finished piece

*shortly after completing these murals, Woodland invited me back to create an even BIGGER mural at their newest, most awesome location on Caine Road. blog post to come soon...........

art adventure day!

I had a rather exciting Friday recently when I joined a local international school to take part in their Year 2 Arts Adventure Day.

Throughout the day I did a series of 30 minutes sessions working with 6 different groups of students, mostly telling them how awesome I was and then proving it by showing them some of my work. I then invited the students to create their own cartoons on a worksheet I had made for the occasion. The children created a range of different expressions simply by changing the eyes and mouths on a face I had drawn, and then their creativity and crazy children brains were given a chance to soar as they completed a cartoon that I had started for them. I regret that I didn't take more photos, but here are a few that I did manage to get:

My favourite cartoon from the day was an especially cute knock-off version of my famous C3PO/Chewbacca cartoon.

You can download your very own copy of the worksheet by clicking right here (and feel free to send me your results; I would love to post them at a later date)

incoming

As you have no doubt noticed, this special 'mass extinction' episode of the Land of Le Beef is breaking the Beef format in a couple of ways. Not only is it one of the rare Beef cartoons that contains a speech balloon, it is also rare occurrence of a Beef two-panel comic. I hope you are all savouring the magnitude of what you are witnessing here - it may not happen again for another 65 million years (or it might happen again next week; only time will tell).

On an unrelated topic, some people might be surprised to learn that I used to work at a palaeontology museum (as a designer), and I would like to take this opportunity to give a shout out to all of my dinosaur enthusiast friends - I hope you like my version of a parasourolophus and pachycephlosaurus; I apologize for any inaccuracies).

Yellow Brick Road

What an exciting week it's been in the Land of Le Beef, with the completion of the first ever Land of Le Beef mural.​ The mural lives at Fill in the Blank, a creative and social workspace in Wan Chai, Hong Kong.

The piece is located on a wall leading to the washroom, and so I wanted to do something that would reflect that, and lead the viewers' eyes in that direction. I also wanted something that would reflect the randomness of the venue (Fill in the Blank is by it's very nature anything that you want it to be - where anyone can show up, and anything can happen), and I thought the Wizard of Oz was a good metaphor of this.

The challenge for me was to recreate the mural in the same style to the rest of the Land of Le Beef family in a completely different size and medium. ​I actually translated as well as I could have hoped. The materials used were pencil, acrylic paint, and oil-based marker. Below is a bit of the process and stages...

Awkward

In case you're wondering if this is a self portrait, it's not - I don't own a shirt like that, and my hair's a little different. The rest of it actually does kind of resemble me a bit, especially the socially awkward part. Anyway, let's not bring my personal issues into this; let's just celebrate everyone's uniques differences. If we could all just join hands and sing 'From a Distance", then the world be a better place...