Ever since the 2014 Hope Murals wrapped up, our team at Big Car, specifically through our Design for Good program, has kept the momentum going with Eli Lilly & Co.’s Oncology on Canvas initiative. It’s a fee-for-service arrangement on paper, sure, but to us, it feels like way more than just a client contract. Lately, we've shifted gears. Instead of painting massive outdoor wall murals, we're focusing on something much smaller, quieter, and far more intimate: individual color-by-numbers canvases.

Honestly, we're thrilled about the pivot.

While public murals are great, they completely miss the people who often need art the most—those stuck in hospital beds or recovering at home, simply too sick to be out and about. These portable canvases are adapted directly from original artwork made by cancer patients and their caregivers. To pull this off, we partnered with the LOOC team and wrestled through logistics with dozens of art suppliers—both local shops and national vendors—to build custom, all-in-one painting kits that can be shipped pretty much anywhere on the planet.

You open the box, and everything is right there.

A ton of the heavy lifting, from organizing materials to mass-producing the actual kits, happens right inside our Tube Factory space. I’ve gotta hand it to Lilly, too—they made a real point to keep sourcing local whenever possible, which we deeply respect.

It's hard to believe, but the 2014 Lilly Oncology On Canvas Art Competition actually marks a full decade—10 years and six rounds!—of this effort. Put on by Lilly Oncology alongside the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS), the callout is wide open. If you live anywhere in the US or Puerto Rico and cancer has touched your life in some way, this is your space. It doesn't matter if you're fighting the disease yourself, sitting at a loved one's bedside, or working late shifts as a nurse—they want your stories and your art. Because sometimes, when normal words completely fall flat, painting the journey is the only thing that makes any sense.

The Sunfish is an image that was painted by Marc Anderson in 2016. The location of the Mural is on the corner of 29th and Harding in Indianapolis Indiana and represents one of the types of fish that can be found in the White River, which is close to the location of the mural.