He worked for
Jim Henson International, designing characters related to the
Muppets, before leaving to pursue a career in
advertising. While freelancing as an agency art director in the early 1990s, Chapman worked on his own creations, one of them being
Bob the Builder, who was created after he spotted a
JCB backhoe loader on a work site and thought they could bring it to life with cartoon eyes, which became the character Scoop (then named "Digger"), followed by other machines, and then thought the machines needed a human operator, which led to the creation of Bob, eventually showing it and his other creations to
Peter Orton, executive chairman of
HIT Entertainment, premiering on
Netflix in September of the same year. In 2022, Chapman partnered with MXT to create an
NFT project called
Moonie Moo. ==Personal life==