Cozy Saturday evening

Danny( www.flickr.com/photos/lucidopticlab ) and I relaxing on the couch...its a cozy Saturday and we are making the best of it. Today was day 8 of my dready journey. I slept last night with out a scarf and woke up a poof ball! It wasn’t a big deal since i didn’t go out much... i spent most of the day cleaning and painting....oh and lots of laundrying. I think i am going to wash my dreads tomorrow since it has been a week. I was told to wash them through nylon. I worry about them in some parts. The baby dreadies are ok along the bottoms but the couple inches after the root are pretty tender...... Maybe I should wait a little long before i wash.
Peace love and best wishes everyone.
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Tidbits

So its friday and we have surived anohter long winter week. It snowed Tuesday up here in Portland Oregon. Yesterday and today we have had freezing fog that tends to just linger like lost phatasms in one spot or another....i love it actually. It gives things a very mystical/spooky vibe. The roads were real slippery cuz of black ice this morning but i made it to work alive and well.
Its day 7 of my Dready Journey....so thats week one down for the count! I will take some more pictures over the weekend. Its taken a lot of restraint not to buy up everything dready on etsy.com There are so many artists that have the most beautiful handmade dread beads and hats and tams and headbands and whatnots.....
speaking of etsy I made my 9th sale today. Someone bought an acrylic painting of mine I did from memory of the Santa Monica Pier during sunset...see?:
its done on a 12" by 12" box framed canvas. Sorry for the image quality. this painting is actually pretty textural...
so, Yay for people supporting struggling artists. Like i say in my policies page on my etsy account: It is important as a consumer to realize and fully appreciate the authenticity and pride that shines from hand made artisan art and craft. It is also important as a consumer to realize that by buying handmade goods from individual artists instead of mass produced goods from corporations one is effecting major positivity in the world around them. Thank you for supporting the artists of today.
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My Dready Journey day 5

day 5 of the dready journey and.... Burrr! its cold up here in Oregon. it snowed yesterday but i have my snuggly locks to keep my neck warm! Ok...i guess they are not quite..."snuggly" yet and wont be for awhile....but i am on my way!
dreadylock tails are interesting see:
i haven’t seen my real color for years but i had cut all my dyed/processed hair off and started growing it out for the all natural all mighty dreads. i dont remember my hair being so red/coppery...as a kid who grew up at the beach my hair was always so bleached from the sun i guess. .i am rediscovering myself already!
So for work i go into the office with my dreads wraped up in whatever scarves i have about in some way like this:
Its trial and error and it seems each bun/wrap is different each day but i suppose once i get into routine i will have my way of doing it. I find that i have to first tie it up in a bun and then wrap it if i want it all up. then i tie the scarf on and knot it once on the nape of the neck and a few times wound around the bun. This seems to stay on all day without shifting and goin limp. its also a nice way to keep cozy in this cold winter season.
i think the wrap might get harder to handle as the dreads mature and get heavy...especially as they grow and build....however I really love wearing it up like that. i feel queeny. whats also interesting is that i feel so much freer/at ease with confidence. I used to always need some sort of hair in my face to hide behind...but not anymore!
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Day 1 of my Dread Lock Journey!

These are my little baby dreadies:
I have finally begun my dready Journey! I have been growing my hair out for some time now waiting for when the time was right to dread my head. I decided earlier this week I would use this weekend to begin the dreading process because of many reasons: Its a new year, I feel I am finally settling in and growing my new roots in Portland Oregon. I am looking forward to dedicating more time to creating and taking my art vending to the next level. I feel I have done well, taking steps towards living a life I love….and really that’s key to becoming a more healthy/well balanced person. I have slowly been righting the way I treat myself and the world around me. I stopped eating meat, fast food, stopped drinking soda and started drinking lots of water, started thinking more positively while also making it a point to be a more active/aware individual. The dreading of my hair is just one more step and in a way a symbol of my sacrifices/goals/ of this journeying towards becoming a more healthy/balanced and independent person…much less dependant/expectant and funding of the products/ways of Babylon.
So the process was pretty vigorous. I got up on Saturday around 7:00 and took a shower and washed my hair with a shampoo that would strip my hair of all the chemicals/pollutants/hair care products in my hair and clean it so there would be no residue left. Once I did that I put my hair in braids and drove around town trying to pickup my dreading supplies. I went to the 99 cent store and bought some hair clips and went to petco and got a flea comb since I needed a tight nit metal comb since I was planning on using the backcombing method to create the dreads. I also got little bands to hold my roots and tips once each dread was made. When I got home I paid a local little girl from my apartment complex $10 to section my hair for me into inch squares of hair. Once that was done I put on a good movie and started backcombing away. I started the backcombing process around 1 in the afternoon on Saturday and didn’t finish untill 11:30 at night. The pictures shown are the ones I took immediately after finishing. Now its just a waiting game. I will keep the rubber bands in for at least a month to help guide and keep secure the dreading process. Once I take the rubber bands out my dreads will hopefully have started really bounding and then I can begin to add beads/stones/artifacts and whatnots to make the dreads even more magical. My arms are so sore! I did it all by myself….so I would highly recommend having someone around to help you dread if you are going to go through with it. It is really tiring after awhile and hard on the neck and back at times. I took a lot of breaks and made sure to drink lots of water and so I survived the process and I am now on my way to having my own mane of locks of love!
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Gearing up for this years Art Walks/Fairs

I am so glad it is Friday. This week seemed to go by pretty slow. However, it has been nice that its been getting dark much later....spring/summer is on its way. This year should be interesting once all of the art vending opportunities pop up with the warmer weather/seasons. I have been trying to create as much as possible so that i have a good many new product to offer up at the artwalks/fairs and whatnot. This year Danny( my hubby/biz partner: www.flickr.com/photos/lucidopticlab ) and I are going to try out the Saturday market in downtown portland. We had wanted to do that when we first moved up here in July of 08 but we were frantically looking for jobs and then i got into a really insane car crash that i am so lucky to have survived. That put a damper on our plans to vend at the Saturday market but we did get a chance to vend at the Last Thursday art walk on Alberta st. We did this 3 times and did fairly well + it was way fun and certainly a worthwhile learning experience.

This was our booth setup for last Thursday art walk on Alberta st the day before Halloween:

and this is Danny and I that same night on the side of our booth:
It took us awhile to accumulate enough funds to buy the canopy you seen in our booth photo, but we made the money in a month by selling our tie- dye at our local farmers market in Cedar Mill, Oregon. In this set up we are selling prints/mini paintings and such things on the table and we had our tie dye hung along the canopy. This was the first time we displayed paintings like that. It took us a little while to come up with the idea of creating some sort of display wall/rack to hang paintings from. For a few months danny and I would go down to the Saturday Market in downtown portland and check out the set up of other art vendors. A lot of them had bought nice industrial fixtures or pegboard to display their paintings on. Unfortunately, we have been a bit strapped for cash in this sinking ship economy that we couldn't afford anything too fancy. So danny and I went into home depot to look for some ideas. We decided to buy a common garden lattice and suspend it from the canopy using S shaped hooks and bungee cords. We got smaller SShaped hooks to hook the paintings on with. As you can see it worked out pretty well! This year we are certainly going to be at hopefully every last Thursday art walk on Alberta st in portland or and we are going to start out at the satruday market on sunday actually. Upon doing research about how to vend at the saturday market i must say its the most extensive/complicated and expensive process i have come across. You must have your product approved by a committee, you then have to pay membership fees that are pretty steep then ontop of that you have to pay 25 bucks per day you vend + you must have a registered business/business license and a number of other things. So, we have pieced all the requirements together and are ready to apply to vend. I found out that if you start vending only on sundays they wave the membership fee so we will be trying that first to make sure we will be a success there before paying membership fees. so we shall see how it all works out....exciting!
If anyone is ever in the area of portland oregon you must check out the saturday market in downtown its not like any artwalk i have ever been to. Last Thrusday on Alberta St is also really fun and a little bit more eccentric/anything goes. Sometimes they shut down the street for the art walk and the entire street becomes one big crazy extravaganza with live bands, tuns of local artists/gallery openings/freaks/the works. So come check out our booth some time!
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Painting in process

So I always seem to have 5 or more paintings that I am working on at one time. This can be good in the sense that while I wait for one to dry I can paint another, or if I get really tired of one painting I can work on a different one. Right now I am trying to dedicate some time to this one, pictured below( sorry for the bad image quality) because I am really not thrilled with the results so far at all. I had high expectations because I based it off this drawing: which I had a lot of fun doodling.....its not coming out anything like I imagined. Perhaps its time to take this painting toward a different direction? I am trying not to give up on this one....its a tuffy.
Perhaps sometimes these pen and ink drawings of mine should just stay pen and ink illustrations. Really, I think I should have done this painting on a larger scale so I could get more detail in....
I am not thrilled with the colors I chose either so I may rework the color scheme a bit. I will post an updated shot once I get some progress on this painting. We shall see how it turns out in the end....
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T-shirt Transfer experiment

image info: Sushi my cat, and I showing off our Hand tie- dyed t-shirt with an image transfer of my cat head drawing on it:

I have wanted to print some of my drawings onto shirts/bags and whatnots for awhile now. I tampered with the art of silk screening by doing it very home-remedy style in my tiny little studio space but my results were not predictable and I found that the more detailed my drawing was the worse it printed. Some have told me this was due to the gage of mesh I was using, some told me that it was because I needed to actually use proper equipment to get nice crisp results and frankly I don’t have any money for MORE equipment/supplies. So I tried buying some cheapo t-shirt transfers that you can just print on using an ink jet. It really didn’t work well at all. It left this ugly white film behind and started cracking and falling off within a few hours( as seen in photo). The first time I washed it the image disintegrated. I have been told that I need to buy commercial grade transfer paper if I want to get it right and have the image be durable and long lasting. It doesn’t seem so terribly expensive either….so soon enough I may have a bunch of new merchandise to sell!…maybe shirts/patches,/bags with prints….don’t know!
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Merry Meet

Hello there,

I very interested in meeting more like-minded peoples as well as promoting my art work( for sale on etsy, thats: http://www.lucidopticlab.etsy.com/ )
You can find more of my work on flickr as well: www.flickr.com/photos/lucidrose

So let me tell you a bit about myself :

My art is the key of my shamanic journey. I create to reconnect with myself as well as the most high. As a whole our species has lost sight of our most important path: our spirit path. We have been distracted and degraded by our hierarchies, technologies and institutions. I produce art in an effort to reestablish my roots in an effort to re connect myself with the earth and its energies...letting the cosmic vibrations swell up within me. My creations are smoke signals and guides for myself and for those who are on their own journeys, reaching out to re grasp the roots of our souls and understand once again the cosmic truth of unity.

My name is Chelsea Rose.I grew up in Venice beach CA. I now live in Oregon amongst the cedar, red woods and Douglas fur trees. When I am not out working I am home creating. I use a lot of different artistic mediums. Right now I am concentrating on acrylic painting primarily. I am also a photographer. I love to draw in pen and ink. Watercolor is exciting. I love to play with mixed media art pieces. Experimentation is key.

Lucid Optic lab is a creative collaboration between my partner, Danny Rodriquez and I. here is the Lucid Optic Lab flickr account: www.flickr.com/photos/lucidopticlab That account is maintained by Danny. He has a lot of his political art up and a lot of design work, as well as samples of our photo retouching services and lots more other goodies. We offer a lot: photographic services, web/design services, photo retouching + we are both artists with lots of work ready and waiting to be sold to the right individual. If you have any questions or comments please give us a note on either flickr accounts, on our etsy account or directly to our email box: creative@lucidopticlab.com
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