An American candy maker whose name has been lost in time invented the jelly bean back in the late 18th century. Even though it took a while before the descendants of  Jelly Belly founders Albert and Gustav Goelitz together with a Los Angeles marketing guru created the original gourmet jelly bean in 1976. I am sure neither of them imagined their popular sweets to be used for brilliant artworks.

Painter and illustrator Kristen Cumings lives in Martinez, California. She created several replicates from world-famous paintings and photographs using thousands of jelly beans. Some of her  for works are shown as part of the Jelly Belly Candy Company corporate collection. Just to give you a glimpse of the work behind this kind of art: Kristen used 15,000 jelly beans for her Mona Lisa masterpiece and she needed approximately 10,000 jelly beans (25-35 different colors! I didn´t even know that there were that many flavors…and we are just talking about brownish ones here…) and a total of 100 hours to finish the grizzly bear project. Wow! Anyway, I love this kind of art and here are my personal favorites by Kristen Cumings.

Make Sure You Know Jelly Bean Artist Kristen Cumings

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All pictures shown here derive from Kristen Cumings´ website. Click here to be directed to her homepage and check out more of her art.

One of the first notable jelly bean artists and self-proclaimed king of jelly bean art is Peter Rocha. Together with his nephew Roger, he created some really impressive portraits I would like to share with you.

Make Sure You Know Jelly Bean Artists Peter and Roger Rocha

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Since I could not find Peter Rocha´s website (if there is one, please let me know!), the pictures shown in the gallery are screenshots taken from the Jelly Belly Art Gallery.

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