Art Adventures in California

In August I took a trip to California to see family, friends and to get arty farty.I was able to document most of my art adventures and I would like to take a moment to share them with you!
I did a "Meet the Artist" pop up live painting event inside Mystic Journey Bookstore in my hometown, Venice Beach.

 

I just loved painting in their patio garden! It was a warm evening with a nice breeze, I was surrounded by big buddha statues and some of the biggest crystals I had ever seen. People trickled through and I had a wonderful time painting and talking to everyone.

The painting I was working on is inspired by the Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother Crone. I depicted each aspect of the trinity, but as mermaids.

I have not finished the painting yet but here are some progress photos taken during my live painting:

So yes….I am looking forward to finding some time to finish this one up. I will post an entry when its all done! 

I had a couple tables set up full of artly goodness like small original paintings on wood, stretched canvas prints, button pins, stickers and more:

See something you have to have. See if you can nab it in my etsy shop.

The next art adventure took place in the Arts district of Downtown LA. I met up with my friend and fellow artist Jennifer Korsen at her studio and we proceeded to paint a super secret collaborative mural in the Alleyway:

work in progress photo

finished photo

My final art adventure took me to San Diego California to a place called Writerz Blok. Its a community art space with a huge lot full of walls covered tip to tail in spray paint that are open to any artists interested in leaving their mark. 

And so I did...

Work in progress, laying down base colors

Fine tuning with highlights and shadow

Got the outlines in and now its all done!

So there is a glimpse into my arty shenanigans during my Cali trip. 

Watch a video I made with footage from the trip on my You Tube Channel, Here. 

I would love to do more traveling and paint/create/collab in new places with new friends because the experience was very inspiring! 

More art updates soon. I have a huge amount of new creations to show you. 

In the mean time, catch up with me on my Youtube channel, Periscope, Instagram and see what sort of art goodies are up for grabs in my Etsy shop. 

Much love!

-Chelsea Rose

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Bench Mural #2 in Portland Oregon

As you may know from my previous post, I was given a contract via community run origination, Alberta Art Works to paint two benches in the Alberta Arts district of Portland Oregon. I am now all done with the 2nd bench mural. See my previous post for photos and info on the 1st bench.

This was my concept painting that was approved for the mural commission.

 I began roughing out the concept on the bench with spray paint and then went back through with a black paint pen to begin to plot out the lines and details of the fish creatures.

and then I began to layer color on top of color, on top of color until I was satisfied with the color depth.

and then came the final details and black outlines.

And just as soon as the paint was dry, Brook from Alberta Art works came by and varnished both of my benches for me!

Here it is all finished!

And here I am with my school of fish ladies :)

I also made a lil video about the creative process involved in painting this bench. Check out the video here on my youtube channel.

Big thanks to Alberta Art Works for facilitating this mural project. Collage art store, thank you for donating the mural paint! Thank you, Just Bob Cafe for making sure I didn't get dehydrated while painting in the sun by offering me all sorts of yummy chilled teas all day long.

That same day, since I finished painting my 2nd bench mural with plenty of daylight and spray paint left, I walked over to one of the Alberta Free Walls where I practiced my spray painting with a quickie Third Eye piece:

Anyhoo, I am very excited to show you my two other recent mural projects. One was done in a Cafe in Southern Oregon, and another done in a patron's bedroom in Portland Oregon. 

More on those very soon!

With love and light,

-Chelsea Rose   

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Alberta Free Walls

My dream has come true! I no longer have to drive hours away to practice my spray painting on a "free wall" because Portland, Oregon  FINALLY has one, although it is temporary.

Here are some photos from the few times I have been able to have a go at this community organized public art space:

My first time out I painted these wormy ladies.

My second visit I painted a fish and a cyclops lady. Unfortunately a couple days later my fish was painted over….but that just gave me an excuse to go back out there and paint an entire school of fishes:

The free wall is located on the side of the Black United Front building on Alberta Street in Portland Oregon.

I made a youtube video all about it. Watch it here! 

With Love and Light,

-Chelsea Rose 

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Recent Spray Painting Experimentations

What with the Holiday's and all I have recently found some time to get back into experimenting with spray painting. Earlier this month I drove down to the Eugene Oregon free wall with friends and had a blast painting:

I started with this piece, inspired by my previous acrylic painting on canvas called The Seed which you can view or purchase a print of here. 

Here it is finished. It took about an hour and a half. I was pretty happy with it, but still abel to see things that I could improve upon…especially line weight control.

I started on one last piece and did it in a about 30 mins because it was getting pretty cold outside and my fingers were starting to go a bit numb.

This spEYEn character has been one of my most popular drawings and most commissioned designs in recent times, so I thought to give it a try in my new favorite medium, spray painting. I had a lot of fun doing the shading on the body and butt with the various colors. 

I took a bunch of footage of the experience and made it into a short video. Watch it on my youtube channel: YouTube.com/ChelseaRoseArts

….And it turns out it was really good that I got some spray painting practice in because the following week I got the opportunity to do some spray painting in California with Jennifer Korsen, a female spray paint muralist that I admire.

Jennifer took me to one of her favorite places to paint called "The Fame Yard" which has some truly awesome artwork on the walls. I was honored and a little intimidated to paint at first but Jennifer was very encouraging and the space was so inspiring that I couldn't help but grab my paint cans and give it a go. So here we are, in the photo above, a couple hours into our paint session, happily painting the day away.

I was excited to see a bit of progress with my line weight and can control. My technique still needs a lot of work but practice makes perfect! 

Here is my mermaid mural all finished! 

And here we are together posing in front of our respective finished murals, grinning ear to ear. 

It was such a fun day! 

I am back from California now and looking over the photos, thus I was moved to make this post and share them with you. I hope you enjoyed! 

I have a bunch of video footage from the day that I have edited into a video which you can check out right here. 

I hope your Holidays and New Year are filled with love and art!

-Chelsea Rose 

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Spray Paint Mural Experiment at the Eugene Oregon Free Wall

Finally having a good stretch of time off from my day job I was able to make the drive out to the Eugene Oregon free wall ( since Portland doesn't have one, which is a total outrage!)

My comfort zone with painting is using a brush, and I have painted several murals in this method as you can see here. However I have recently developed an interest in spray painting, especially after becoming a member of the Murals and Girls team. Before my trip out to Eugene I made a few experiments with the medium, by doing so on pieces of scrap board which you can see here. But I had never done any large pieces on a wall, so Eugene was my first big spray painting experiment. Have a look:

I began without a set concept sketch on paper but with the idea of painting two opposing goddess/alien/faery creature girls, with their hair sort of swirling together mid wall. So, first I sketched out a rough outline of the first character and began to fill her in.

My first creature lady filled out pretty quickly and so after I felt most of her color had been roughed out, I put down the black lines and moved on to start roughing out her sister's outline and color.

Once I had both of them roughed out, I went back in an added some final highlights and details, and then went back over everything with black...that is, till I ran out of black! Lesson learned: bring triple of every color and perhaps even quadruple of black and white!

And then I was all done! Here I am feeling a lil tired but mostly happy and accomplished.

All in all, I spent around 2 and a half hours painting, had lots of fun and learned so so much. I hope to make another trip out there soon to continue my experimentations with spray painting. Maybe next time I will do a mermaid creature lady! We shall see.

In other news, my art will be showing at Nectar Cafe for the next month and a half, and will also be on display at the Tea Zone & Camellia Lounge for the month of June. And come August, I am pretty excited about a solo exhibition at Future Shock gallery! Will post more on all of this soon.

Also there are plenty of new items in my online shop to grab up!


(a photo from this past week's Last Thursday Art walk on Alberta, showing off a bunch of new art goodies)

I added some art prints of several of my recent acrylic paintings and there are now 10 of my handmade art pendants listed and ready to go to a good home!

 So go visit my shop, and support the arts cuz mama needs some mo' spray paint ;)

Much love always,
-Chelsea Rose

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The Mermaid Door, spray paint experiments and more

Continuing on with my recent kick, which has been painting on anything but canvas,( mostly found objects, scrap wood and other curiosities) I wanted to share with you some of my recent creations!

Here is my Mermaid Door painting. Its quite literally what it sounds to be. I found a rather pristine door leaning against a dumpster and instantly wanted to drag it home to paint!

And paint it I did! It was so big I had to set it up in my living room. And now that It is all done I am not entirely sure what I will do with it, its so large. I may try in the near future to have it made to be freestanding, with some sort of base. This would allow me to put it in a gallery space and allow it to function as a door to nowhere. Which means I may have to paint the other side!

Amongst other unconventional painting surfaces, I have recently begun to collect things like My Lil Ponys and various strange dolls from thrift stores and give them new life:

Introducing, Epona. Who was once a lonely and forsaken My Lil Pony at a local goodwill toy bin. I took her home, chopped off her head, created a new one complete with horns out of modeling clay, and then attached it and gave her a new paint job.

I recently had another go, but with a bigger pony I found at the bins:

I pretty much did the same thing. I lobbed off the head, and re sculpted it, and then painted the entire thing anew. I am working on a few more and will soon have a small and very strange herd of these creatures under my care.

I have also been experimenting with spray paint!



This was my first time trying to spray paint. It was pretty hard! Finger control seemed to be important and I spent most the time trying to figure out how quick to move my hand and how close or far away to keep the nozzle for favorable line weight. I also learned that its easiest to build the image by laying blobby base shapes down with color and then "cutting" into them with the line weight to sharpen and detail the image. It was a pretty good learning experience but near the end I got pretty woozy! I was using a dollar store painting mask under a bandanna to keep the fumes at bay which didn't really do the trick. When I took off the mask and looked in the mirror I found my nostrils to be bright green, and thus presumed most of my respiratory system to match.

 Soooo...that was a few months ago. I didn't pick up the spray paint to do much more experimenting till I recently acquired a respirator mask.

So here are some photos from my 2nd experimentation with spray paint:

So I feel I improved from the first time with my can control. Still lots and lots to learn but I think Im ready to try some spray paint on a wall without embarrassing myself too much. Will keep you posted.

And last but not least:



I have 17 original paintings for sale in my etsy shop, not to mention a lot of prints and even some hand made stickers!



So if you have not taken a look at my shop in awhile, check it out now!

As always, thanks for the support.

Blessings,
-Chelsea Rose

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