Welcome To The Happy Monsters Network

Welcome to the home page of the Happy Monsters' Network, an overview site for the business activities of the Belgium based firm, Happy Monsters' Studios. On this site you will be able to read a little about all of the businesses which are a part of the network, and be able to follow each project via their respective twitter feeds.

So what is the Happy Monsters' Network?

The Happy Monsters' Network is a family of businesses which are run by Chrischa Van de Voorde, under the Happy Monsters name.

The network was born from Happy Monsters' Studios, which was originally formed in 2002 by Chrischa, with the original intention of creating cover art for bands and authors. Over the years, the business has grown beyond it's original aim, and now offers a range of services which include not only illustration work, but also graphic and web design.

Whilst building up Happy Monsters' Studios, Chrischa also represented one half of De Spinnekoppen (a local slang word for spiders) face paint team. With her sister (Vanessa Van de Voorde) she helped to build up a wide range of clients for the Face Painting, ranging from local councils (Gent, Merelbeke, Aalst and more), to international companies, such as Mercedes, ING, Ikea and the political party Open VLD.

With the continued success of De Spinnekoppen, in 2004 Chrischa launched Het Spinnenwebje, an online face paint store, which stocks mostly Wolfe FX paint. In 2011 this store was relaunched and continues to be the leading European supplier of Wolfe FX face paint.

Since 2002, building Happy Monsters' Studios and Het' Spinnekoppen have taken up all of Chrischa's time, but towards the end of 2009, she got the idea to try her hand at creating an original comic book series. With her partner (David Perkins, who runs his own small business, One Man & His Laptop) the pair started to formulate ideas for an original story.

To back up the release of this work, Happy Monsters will be establishing a publishing arm of the business, which will initially be focussed on selling and promoting the forthcoming comic book series, but will hopefully expand from there to become a full comic book publisher.

With all of these activities on the go, and with the planned 2011 relaunch of Happy Monsters' Studios, it was felt that now would be a good time to create this network site, so that friends, clients and potential business partners can keep track of the latest Happy Monsters news and updates.

On This Site:

On this site, we have provided an overview of each area of our business, along with links to their respective websites and a twitter feed, so that you can keep track of all the events happening for each business.

We are always thinking of new ideas and initiatives which could help to expand or improve our network, but if you have any questions or comments, please use the form on our contact form.

Thanks for visiting, and we hope to hear from you soon.

All The Best: The Happy Monsters' Team

Happy Monsters' Studios is a creative design studio, which is capable of providing original web sites, custom illustration work and a wide range of graphic design, such as business cards and advertisements.

Happy Monsters' Studios began life in 2002, as way to produce cd cover artwork for the bands Chrischa was a fan of. Humble beginnings for sure, yet it was from this small focus, that the monsters became noticed for their distinctive illustration work. Since 2002 the business has grown to be a far more general design studio, providing everything from original mascots for American law firms, to illustrations, business cards and a multitude of websites for European businesses.

Multi Disciplined Skills

Happy Monsters' Studios are a firm which takes pride in employing every area of their expertise to a project. So illustration assignments will benefit from graphic design, websites will often be illustrated to give them a distinctive look, and of course new businesses who are looking for a wide range of branding material will find they need look no further than Happy Monsters' for all of their needs.

The monsters' take great pride in their open and honest way of doing business, and are happy to put not only their prices online for all areas of their business, but a detailed F.A.Q. page, which gives clients an idea of how they work.

Keeping Pace

In November 2011, Happy Monsters' Studios re-launched their business with a new website, a range of new services and a fresh visual brand.

Keeping pace with the latest happenings of the industry, Happy Monsters now offers a dedicated range of services aimed at mobile web development, search engine optimisation, and most recently, social media consultation.

These new services, along with a renewed focus on illustration, place Happy monsters' Studios on a sure footing going forward, and should see the studio continue to serve a wide range of diverse clients, with quality design work.

Happy Monsters' Publishing is a brand new initiative from Happy Monsters, aimed at promoting their own comic book initially, but plans to expand beyond. Looking at the current comic book market, Happy Monsters' believe that the market is saturated with certain genres, whilst others seem to have lost their place.

The Sending

Toward the final months of 2009, founder of Happy Monsters' Studios, Chrischa Van de Voorde, dug out some sketches from her old high school days, and amongst the usual doodles, she discovered an old comic book her and her sister were playing around with. It was called De Zending (The Sending) and was put together by both sisters drawing a scenario on a post-it note, with one being a reaction to what the other had drawn on the other.

Both being equally crazy in their own right, the scenarios became more and more fantastical, with everything from hippies taking over the world to the angry pencil gods accidentally erasing the universe occurring. It was deeply surreal, and contained enough copyright violations to ensure we'll all be in our 1000's until it could be released 'as is', but buried beneath the character and confusion, was a whimsical spirit and a love of the extraordinary, and it's this central tenant of The Sending which the monsters hopes to capture with their first comic release.

Beyond Print

One of the key initiatives behind Happy Monsters' Publishing, will be to make full use of modern technologies such as HTML5, to deliver their comics digitally, an area which Belgian comic book publishers have thus far failed to successfully break into.

Happy Monsters strongly believe that creating a brand is more important than just selling comic books, and every comic released will be backed by a full range of promotional merchandise and social media integration, in order to make as big an impact on as small a budget as possible.

Branching Out

Whilst not yet taking submissions, the plan is to have Happy Monsters Publishing as a full going concern by early 2013, with both their own comic available to buy, and a sequel under way. Based on the success of their own comic, Happy Monsters will then evaluate how far to push the publishing arm of the business.

The Spinnekoppen is a Belgium based face paint team, originally formed in 2000 by Chrischa and Vanessa Van de Voorde.

Over the last ten years, De' Spinnekoppen (translated literally as The Spider Heads, a name given to the twins by a teacher who was forever catching them doodling in class) have become one of the most reputable and successful face paint studios in the country, providing high quality face painting to some of the most internationally recognised firms in the world, such as Mercedes and IGN.

A Class Of Their Own

Distinguishing them amongst other face paint studios is their passion for delivering quality results. Both Chrischa and Vanessa have followed workshops from the worlds best face painters, including Nick and Brian Wolfe, Lynne Jamieson, Mark Reid and Olivier Zegers. Whilst they have never been about competitions, in 2007 they won second place in the Fantasy Worldwide face paint contest.

As well as providing a quality face paint service, The Spinnekoppen also provide workshops, where people can learn the basic tenants of face painting. These workshops have proven extraordinarily popular, with each workshop proving to be a sell out success.

Building The Team

In 2009 Vanessa left The Spinnekoppen to pursue a career as a professional tattooist, and now runs her own tattoo studio, Toryumon Tattoo, which has not only become a success in it's own right, but has quickly distinguished Vanessa as a unique talent within the industry.

With Vanessa pursuing her tattoo career, Chrischa enlisted some of the finest face painting talent across the country to partner with, and can now call on over a dozen high quality face painters to meet the needs of the most demanding event.

The Spinnekoppen continue to take regular bookings, and can be seen out and about most weekends, or if you're in Belgium, you can often catch them at The Gent Festival, where they paint regularly each year.

Het Spinnenwebje is Happy Monsters online face paint store, which specialises in the sale of high quality water based face paint. Het' Spinnenwebje has existed since mid 2004, and was initially set up to sell and promote the Wolfe FX brand of face paint.

Wolfe FX

Wolfe Makeup is a brand of high quality water based face and body paint, which produces a broad range of face and body paint material and training materials. Chief amongst their products is the hydrocolour makeup, which includes the essentials, metallix, neon and skinz range, all of which have been firm favourites with the leading painters in the industry for years.

In addition to their popular range of paints, Wolfe FX also produce a popular range of glitter and airbrush paint, which have gone from strength to strength in both popularity of quality since their launch.

Another area where Wolfe FX excel, is that their products cover the needs for both the highest quality professional, and greenest beginner, offering the range of quality of product demanded by the professional, whilst also providing a full catalogue of training material, as well as beginner sets and pre-packed painting kits.

A Better Web

Het Spinnenwebje remains the biggest seller of Wolfe makeup within Europe, but in 2011 Happy Monsters relaunched the store with the latest shopping cart software and sales have exploded across the board. Indeed the biggest problem has been keeping the products in stock.

Plans are afoot to expand the store to stock more than just Wolfe makeup, but it's still early days and Happy Monsters remain committed to the Wolfe brand regardless.

For the immediate future, Happy Monsters will build crucial social network support into the new design, and fill out the site with more information about the brand, keeping our clients up to date about the best products in the industry.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us, then please phone us using the numbers listed here.