El Chivo Stencil

I think we are all familiar with Banksy by now. After all he made stenciling and street art famous – he even has a book at Urban Outfitters, but don’t let it stop you from trying your hand at the art. People all over the globe have been using stencil art to spread political messages and good humor alike since long before the current modern street wear & urban art culture explosion.  If you wanna check out what some other folks are doing check out some galleries at  Art  of the State & Stencil Graffiti.

Anyone can make a stencil and you can use it again and again to plaster everything in sight with whatever you can cut out of a piece of cardboard or mylar with a razor blade. I remember crudely cutting my band’s logo out of the back side of a cereal box pulled from a recycling bin, and using regular spray paint to tag it on scraps of canvas, it wasn’t anything fancy but I think we were the 1st band in the school to have “merch” ; a term that would imply we sold them, when we really just gave them to anyone who would actually safety pin it to something!

If you wanna give it a shot snag a blade, an old box and a sharpie and have at it. If you’re stumped for original ideas you can find tons of Free Stencils for personal use & public enjoyment (read not for resale) at STENCILPUNKS.org and start making your world a more colorful place. If you have an original design you don’t mind sharing you can even submit it to them and get credited to live on forever in Internet Infamy & have punk kids across the globe tagging your art on every surface known to man.

I wish the scribble happy taggers that slopped up some initials all over our alley knew about the site. They could have put up 2x as many 4x as fast and have it look 10x better.  Artistic graffiti is like urban renewal, it’s not like that dumpster in your apt. complex wasn’t an eyesore before you stenciled that mural on it!