as graffiti-writers call their work , tagging,"
Banksy first tried it when he was 14, realized that he was simply not quick enough,
for multicoloured works some of the most impressive graffiti artists create on the sides of buildings, freeway overpasses, or urban walls.
The more time an image took him to make, the higher the chances of his being picked up for vandalism by the police.
To speed up the process, he began to cut out stencils at home of images or phrases he wanted to paint.
He makes stencils to make a quick getaway and a stylised effect,
While banksy usually does stencils for each layer of colour, creating a screen-print like effect, i would be more likely to use watercolours and acrylic to get a variation effect
I began doing stencils when my friend Tim were to make some for his trucks speaker box, our friends Chris and Johnny had already made some Donnie Darko rabbits for their 21st suites,
We (me and tim) made inverted stencils, so cut out images that we would spray over,
People liked them so we showed them how to do it, taping the back of magazine pages and cutting out images
One of our friends James Wilkinson had stencilling down to a bit of a fine art, drawing his own pictures and then editing out the pieces to keep various lines,
So i looked through a few, looking at different types on snow gear, skateboards, the net and started to learn how to get various effects,
After makin a few pictures and spraying a few cars etc. People started to ask me about portraits so i made some,
Then a while after when i was catching up with my friend Cam who had just been in London, we were talking about the stencils and stone etc, and he was like woe check this out, he showed me a book called “wall and piece”. “Check it out this dudes amazing, this dude banksy , banksy mate hes a cool as graffiti artist”. I had a look through the book and he showed me all the different graphs of atms, police officers, lines of coke etc “ looks real eh” cam said, “holy thats sik aye” I said.
“Its like what you do”, i was like “this is a bit more time and realistic”, “practice mate you can do that” he said So i started doing bigger stencils, spraying them on canvas, started fill them in with acrylic and watercolours, though sometimes doing some colours and shapes with cut outs and stencils,
You know every now and then i would here about this graffiti artist from people from or returning from London, oh yeah maybe i have heard of em, his works were so various though wasn’t always that sure we were talking about the same dude, Then one day i was at someones flat, a friend brought up that i do some art, “oh yeah what do you do”, they asked, “ oh a bit of painting stencils etc some stone”
“Oh check out this book its this graph artist from London”, “oh yeah think i have heard of him, oh yes no i have seen this book before, awe woe, oh wait are these stencils , no way they are too, awe thats why Cam”.....
It wasn’t until a few years later that i realised why the book Cam showed me was so relevant, and that most of the amazing life like images we buzzing about were graph stencils.
