California-based artist Kristen Cumings spends hours on end piecing together detailed works of art out of thousands of colorful jelly beans. Needless to say her pieces look good enough to eat.

Although it must be fun working with jelly beans for a living, making 4 x 6 feet murals out of them is definitely painstaking work. Cumings uses between 8,000 and 12,000 jelly beans for her stunning masterpieces and it takes over 50 hours to complete each one. She starts the artistic process by looking at a close up of the reference photo, and then visualizes where each colored jelly bean has to go. She then paints an acrylic version of the photo on a blank canvas, and once that dries, she begins applying the small beans and tries to match the colors as best she can. The painter/illustrator uses spray adhesive to make sure the jelly beans stick, and usually likes to start her artworks by recreating the main features, like the eyes and nose. Then she just starts applying the other jelly beans from the bottom up until the piece is completed.

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Director Greg Jardin spent the last two years making a music video for singer/songwriter Kina Grannis using a whopping 288,000 jelly beans. I think it’s fair to say this is literally sweetest video ever created.

Inspired by the jelly bean art of artists like Roger Rocha, Malcolm West and Kristen Cumings, Greg Jardin thought it would be a good idea to make a music video almost entirely out of jelly beans, for Kina Grannis‘ song “In Your Arms”. The young singer thought it was an amazing idea, although she did have some problems even imagining how it was going to look like, so the ambitious director got to work. He had a friend, who is an illustrator, draw up  all the concept art and email it to him, and he turned into an animatic. There were over 2,300 frames he had to recreate out of differently colored jelly beans.

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Self-proclaimed King of Jelly Bean Art, Peter Rocha and his talented nephew Roger create impressive mosaics using thousands of colored jelly-beans.

The two Rochas spend up to six months creating the sweet masterpieces, understandable since thy use around 10,000 different types of jelly beans. Throughout their artistic careers, the artistic duo have created over 75 jelly-bean mosaics, commissioned by the Jelly Belly Candy Company.

Recently, Roger Rocha showcased a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II at the time of her coronation, in 1952, made from 10,000 jellybeans. The 4-foot-high artwork is now on display at Fizziwig’s Sweet Emporium in Brighton, UK.

Check out a selection of the finest jelly-bean mosaics, by Peter and Roger Rocha, after the jump.

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