Jackie Petrovic paints dogs with positive words to fill the tunnel on June 20.

Paint fumes filled the air as the community put their artistic skills to a test at the community graffiti tunnel near American Legion park on Tuesday, June 20.

Funded by the Redmond Commission for Art in Public Places, the graffiti art tunnel located at the south end of Dry Canyon was created in 2021 as an artistic outlet for local artists and a safe space to paint and draw.

Artists of all ages came to paint anything they wanted — as long as it was appropriate. Participants had the opportunity to paint on a blank canvas that RCAPP set out, or paint over any of the existing artwork on the graffiti-filled stretch of concrete.

“I love for children to do this because it gives them something nice to do,” said K.C. Synder, an artist who was helping out with the project. “They can express themselves. I think that the most important thing is to be able to express themselves.”

10-year-old Ella Osborne has participated in the event in each of the last three years. This time, she decided to create a small mushroom painting.

“It’s fun because I can just kind of paint whatever I want,” she said. “It’s really fun to just draw here in the tunnel. And a lot of times you can come in here, come back the next day and it’s completely different because the art just changes every day.”

Residents are free to come to the tunnel and paint at any time they please. Many artists come down weekly to see new art replacing or reworking their previous projects.

Muralist Tracy Thille paints in the tunnels often. She says she enjoys coming out and seeing other members of the community participate because “it’s a space that’s safe for anybody to paint.”

The last project she worked on — a hungry caterpillar from the children’s book — was already being painted over by other artists.

“If you’d like to paint big or you want to experiment painting big, this is a totally safe space to do it because it’ll get painted over,” Thille said. “It’s a fun space for anybody, little kids, old ladies.”

From little doodles of video game characters to large scale painting of aliens, the opportunities to showcase one’s artistic talents are endless.

“I think it’s really good especially for artists who graffiti as their main source of art,” said RCAPP staff liaison, Jackie Abslag. “It gives them a place to express their type of art, which, if it wasn’t for this, there would be no place for them to go.”