From the City of the Arts to the National Parks

Kelsey Voss sits at attention.

A display of postcards, magnets, T-shirts and more sits next to her. All the products bear her national park designs. There’s dancing fireweed and mountains for Glacier National Park, bison for Yellowstone National Park, a reflection of the northern lights for Isle Royale National Park.

It’s early March and Voss is in San Francisco, Cali. for the Public Lands Alliance Convention, a who’s who of US National Parks. Along with sessions like how to secure grants for nonprofits, nature wellness programs, and better ways to tell stories, there’s a trade show with more than 100 vendors hoping their wares catch the eyes of buyers looking to fill park gift shops.

This is Voss’ first time at the convention. The Port Moody-raised artist, whose business, Sun Earth Moon, launched in 2021, was encouraged to attend by a contact from an Alaskan national park where she already sells her merchandise.

At the convention, she has 15 hours to entice other national parks to buy her art. Everyone at the trade show is competition, although she’s one of the few fine artists.

Voss invested thousands of dollars to be at the trade show. Now she needs a buyer to fall in love with her designs.

More than 325.5 million people visited US National Parks last year. In Canada, that number is closer to twenty million visitors at national parks, historic sites and marine conservation areas annually. Many tourists like to bring home a keepsake to help remember their experience, so many parks provide gift shops. But selling your products in a national park gift shop isn’t as easy as sending a few samples and a buying list. There’s no cold-calling or sending emails into the void. In most cases, you have to know someone and even then it can be a slow process.

“You kind of have to be patient and wait for them to initiate,” says Voss. “It’s very word of mouth.”

TikTok kickstart

The artist’s first two big contracts came from her social media accounts, which are a big part of her business.

“I started really heavily on TikTok and that honestly kickstarted my business,” she says. “I put in so much time and I probably don’t even spend enough time. It’s hard. Some weeks I’m fully into social media and other weeks, I’m like, ‘I just need a break.’”

These days she focuses on Instagram where she has more than 57,000 followers. Recently she’s posted videos from her trips to the national parks, behind the scenes clips of getting merchandise ready for the national parks gift shops and stills of her prints.

Growing up in nature

Voss grew up in an active and outdoorsy family. They lived in a heritage home in central Port Moody. She would often explore Rocky Point Park on bike and by foot. Voss was in a canoe when she was just two weeks old and celebrated her first birthday with a canoeing party at Como Lake.

Every summer, she’d go on a canoeing trip with her mom, dad and younger sister. They had family friends who also liked to explore the backcountry by water and together they’d pick a river — usually in central or northern B.C. — and then spend one or two weeks paddling.

Their trips took them into the backcountry, completely off-grid and remote.

Spending time in nature is still a major part of Voss’ life. Now, instead of exploring rivers in B.C., she’s skiing and hiking in the Rockies thanks to a recent move to Calgary.

Olympian/artist/scientist

When she was younger, Voss thought she might grow up to be an Olympian (she swam, played field hockey and skied downhill, all competitively in her youth), then an artist (her outlet while attending Port Moody Secondary School), then a scientist (her parents were both engineers). As it turns out, she landed on artist.

Art continued to be a creative outlet for her through high school, with Voss progressing from pencil to acrylic paint. Despite her talent, she put art aside while attending post-secondary school for a science-based program.

A few years later, during some forced bed-rest following a surgery, Voss picked up her tablet and started playing around with a program called Procreate which lets you be an artist of any medium. She traced an old photo from a trip to Yoho National Park and turned it into a digital painting. She recorded a video of the process and posted it to TikTok, a social media app where users can post and view short videos.

Voss painted a couple more parks and her interpretation of Glacier National Park went viral. The orders started to come in hot.

Creating a national park composition takes time. Voss uses reference photos for her creations, either her own, pictures from friends, or in some cases, from park rangers.

A superintendent with Ontario Parks saw her videos on TikTok and wanted her to create art for five of the parks they managed. They provided reference images taken by the park’s rangers.

Before Voss even takes stylus pen to tablet, she does a lot of research.

“Are there special animals in the park? What do people like to see there? Are there specific hikes or viewpoints? And then find a bunch of photos and make my own collage of what I want it to look like,” she says. “Lighting is a big factor too. I can basically never find a photo of a viewpoint I like with the lighting I like, so it’s usually a combination of things to put together a poster.”

She then decides on the composition, and finally, begins the sketch.

The artist’s style has matured over the years. Voss’ work has flowy lines that give the work a dynamic look. She says she has been compared to the Group of Seven, a group of Canadian landscape painters from the early 1900s.

“The Group of Seven is a historic style of painting in Canada but it does have sort of that contemporary flow to it,’” she says. “I really like flowy lines and I like it to feel like there’s a lot of movement in my pieces.”

The convention

The trip to San Francisco proved fruitful. Voss thinks her designs were popular among the buyers. She’s going to be selling in more parks this year. There will be Grand Teton, Voyageur and Glacier National Parks, in addition to her previous Denali and Mount Rainier National Parks. She’ll also be selling at a Canadian national park this year.

Voss’ mom died in 2016. She was an engineer by trade, but an artist at heart. Voss thinks her mom would be proud of the business she’s created. She’s pursuing it full-time, and chose Sun Earth Moon over a career in the sciences. Had the business never taken off, her art would still be a hobby today.

It’s a relatively busy time of year for the business. Voss is busy inspecting and barcoding products. Soon, she’ll have to mail them off to their respective parks so they can be ready for tourist season.

Then, Voss might be able to enjoy some downtime and get out to the mountains this summer. She’s excited to visit Yoho National Park, which will have some of her shirts for sale for the first time.

“When I go to a park store and especially some big ones, it’s super exciting seeing all the stuff of the park that you just explored for the day and you get to have some keepsakes,” she says. “It’s fun to think that my art is there and that hundreds of people each day get to see it. That’s pretty cool.”