Stenciling

To experiment further and develop my journey with street art, I began to search for more artists and techniques to improve my work. To do this, I looked into the media and saw a news article about Banksy, which inspired me to look into his work and what he does. 

Banksy

His work was recently sold at an auction for £860,000; as the auction happened, however, the piece had shredded itself. This was done by a shredder most likely being hidden in the frame, as auctioneers were not able to search the frame beforehand. This had inspired me to look more into his work itself and see the meaning behind it. 

Banksy is an anonymous street artist that creates street art with usually dark meanings such as terrorism, war and hypocrisy using stencilling. While he is mostly known for his work on walls, he has also done some illustrations onto canvas.

Banksy has to use stencils for his work due to the surfaces he uses tend to be illegal, making it a necessity to get images up on the surface as quick as possible. He uses these surfaces due to the relation they would have to the piece. Therefore, all of his pieces are site-specific, having political or social messages that are related to that specific area. The scale of which he uses is rather large also, being usually lifelike or bigger. He did it proportionately realistic in order for the pieces to seem much more personal to those who view it. This would allow his messages to come across much stronger than it would if it was smaller or larger scales.  

Because of the nature of stencilling, he often has to use a limited colour palette as creating a piece using stencils with a vast amount of different colours will take up a lot of time. Because of this, the colours he uses are usually black and white, with one highlight colour that is typically red. 

Stencilling

To prepare to stencil my own work, I decided to start of simple. I used a detail from one of my recent pieces of work that I felt would work effectively as a stencil. I think it would work effectively as a stencil because it has good line and form in the piece, which would give me enough lines that could be cut out in a way that it creates an interesting and detailed stencil. 

However, the piece itself is rather small, and to create a stencil easier I would have to use a bigger image. To do this, I photocopied the image and enlarged it onto an A4 piece of paper. This would make the lines larger and therefore create a bigger stencil. 

Next, I cut the lines of which I want to be the stencil out using a knife. I then cut out a piece of cardboard that is slightly larger than my stencil and placed the paper on top of it, keeping it in place with masking tape. I needed my cardboard to be slightly bigger than my paper due to the risk of over spray of the spray paint if the stencil didn't have a big enough border around it. 

Once this was done, I had to line the shapes of which I cut out of the paper to create an outline for what I had to cut out of the cardboard. I then used the knife to cut out the shapes in the cardboard. The problem I had is that while cardboard is cheap and easy to find, this type of cardboard is incredibly thick and therefore harder to cut due to the amount of layers it has. In addition to this, the amount of smaller shapes I had in the cardboard made it increasingly difficult to create the stencil. I also found that I had no curved lines which didn't give my stencil much variety of shape either. 

This stencil I feel is good for abstract works and I used it in a way to create a piece by spraying my stencil with one colour, then changing the angle and spraying with a different colour. The spray paint also overlapped in a way that it blended into one another, depending on the intensity of the colour used. I feel the bold colours overlapping of spray paints created a texture that is soft yet rough in some areas, creating a contrast of texture. As well as this, the res spray paint I used leaked slightly onto the work, created red dots around the piece. While this wasn't intentional, I feel in some areas it works well but I feel to improve I would spray onto the piece vertically so if there is any leaks it would not fall onto the piece. 

There is also an over spray on the image which I first hadn't intended to do, but I felt as I looked into the effect more I felt it was effective with the form created, so I decided to use it intentionally. However, I feel I used too much over spray in my image which ended up making the piece look too cluttered. So to improve, I would only over spray some colours on the piece. 

Overall, I felt like the stencil I had used was not effective. I believe this is because I did not prepare in the way I could for the stencil so I made mistakes that could've been easily avoided, such as the form I used which created many small shapes that had to be cut out, which made it difficult to cut. It also could not be recognised as anything, so to improve I would prepare by making a stencil that could be recognised as something, with appropriate detail that could make the piece more interesting on its own.  I would also choose a better and thinner surface for the stencil as I feel that the cardboard is too difficult to cut. 

Preparation for refining a stencil

To prepare for my next stencil, I first decided on what I wanted to show in my work. To bring my work back to graffiti, I decided the best thing I could use for my stencil would be my tag. I feel my tag has an appropriate balance of both straight and curved lines which would challenge me to cut different shapes an lines. As well as this, it links to me personally so I feel it is appropriate to use this as my tag. 

To begin, I drew out my tag in a way that would be the lines of the stencil. While I liked this tag, I feel that the form is too far apart from one another and by itself it does not look very interesting. Because of this, I redrew my tags in different ways in an attempt to make my tag look more interesting to be used as a stencil. 

I began to change my tag in a way that made it slightly more compact to fit into an A3 stencil. I decided to change the arrows in a way that they would touch the letters, which I felt was effective because everything joined one another smoothly and nothing seemed out of place. After asking for opinions and looking at the tag styled myself, I have decided the most effective tag is the left tag. This is because the gap between the lines of the O and the arrow is small, not too far apart and keeping compact and together well. As well as this, the angle of the right arrow look much more like an arrows compared to the other 2 tags. 

To move forward, I drew that tag on a A3 piece of paper, using a ruler to keep all of the straight lines as straight and even as possible. However, as I began to cut the paper I realised that the arrows joining the letters made it so the paper in between the lines would fall due to having no connection to the rest of the paper. Because of this, I had to revise my tag in a way that I would not having any untouched piece of paper that I needed so it wouldn't fall out and ruin the stencil. The areas I had to refine were the gaps in the arrows, and the gap inside of the O. 

I also began to realise that this piece is not very detailed, and so I believe the stencil wouldn't be very exciting on its own. To fix this, I also began to add slight details into the letters and lines of my piece to make it more detailed and interesting.

I then fixed the stencil by adding some different kinds of lines and spikes which I felt made the stencil much more detailed and graffiti-like. For my stencil, I also used a thinner cardboard which was much easier to cut and therefore allowed me to create a detailed stencil that was cut much neater. 

Compared to my last stencil, I believe I have improved by making the tag much more personal to me by the use of a tag. I also believe the detail of the lines made the piece have a lot more form appropriate detail that is interesting and not too cluttered and compact.

I used my stencil to create this piece by overlapping my tag onto one another in different colours. I added depth into the piece by overlapping them in front of one another that makes it look 3D. I also used purple, red and blue due to purple being the product of red and blue blended together. This made it seem like the colours have been separated when they were travelling as the slightly blurred images creates movement in the piece. I feel to improve this piece, I would remove the slight over spray lines of the piece as I feel it does not fit with the movement of the piece.