Gruffalo hunt!

Being an illustrator with a bit of photoshop skill can be fun when it comes to dealing with kids. My nephew Rafferty is starting to really use his imagination in his games so when we took a trip to Newborough woods in Anglesey I saw the chance for a bit of fun.  

I’d recently heard about a guy who took his star wars mad kids to a huge forrest and convinced them that the ewoks really lived there. He soon had them sneaking around hunting for ewoks and running away when they got too close, taking photos the whole time. Of course he then simply had to photoshop a bunch of ewoks into the photos and they had hard proof of their adventure.

So why couldn’t we have a similar adventure? Rafferty just happens to be a big fan of the Gruffalo, and we even saw a rare red squirrel as soon as we arrived, as though inviting us to start the story.

So we told him we were going on a walk and to be on the look out for Gruffalo. At first we had to convince him that the swaying tree in the distance was the result of the great beast stomping through the woods, but in no time at all he was declaring that he could see it for himself! When Janet (his mum) hid behind a tree and screamed at the top of her lungs that the Gruffalo was after her, Rafferty (all of three years old) ran to her rescue, shaking his fists in the general direction of the danger. 

When we got back home and packed the little man off to bed, I set to work. I whipped up a Gruffalo in Zbrush, then shopped him into our dramatic pictures. Not bad for an evenings work. Now we have the fun part of showing Rafferty that his adventure was real!