Secrets Of The Sticker Shed - Sticker Making Workshop

High Roller Society
10 Palmers Rd
London E2 0SY

25 March 2012

All photos: NolionsInEngland

Stickers photographed in the wild are by a variety of artists and are not all made by Stickee



Stickers operate at the margins of general acceptability, slightly less vilified than tagging by the “I love street art but tags are mindless vandalism” brigade. Stickering is a vital and vibrant culture where the graffiti's “up and prolific” mindset fondles street art’s aversion to risk.


feat Nylon, printed by Stickee


High Roller Society took time from its hectic schedule to host a workshop by sticker maker Stickee. In the presence of some of London’s leading users of robust and permanent stickers, who understandably shied towards anonymity on the fringes of the gathering, Stickee demonstrated how the gap between you and home production of top quality screen printed stickers is bridged with a bit of software and some low cost hardware, most of which you probably already own.




Stickering is a broad label so to put Stickee’s product in context, sticker “artists” get up using anything ranging from hand written courier labels with acres of lovely white space, check our 2011 novelty street stickering interview with wordy DHL label supremo Curly, lazer jet printed envelop labels, “my name is” stickers to hi end multi-colour giclee printed and shaped vinyl productions. Often a glance around the edges of a street art show might reveal a little pile of artist stickers filling the function of calling card, usually worth trousering a few of those whilst sinking a few of those free weird tasting Ukranian cyders (or whatever they are, often it becomes difficult to remember).




Stickee is a full time sticker maker and the quality of his product belies the slightly Heath Robinson ramshackle production line. Starting with the art work which is imported or scanned into illustrator, a black template is prepared including registration marks which are incredibly important for the shape cutting at the end. Working in the CMYK colour scheme the template is printed on to acetate which is then used to burn the silk screen. Eschewing the very expensive vacuum photo exposure unit, Stickee creates the screens using a duvet vacuum bag (£1!!) and piece of foam, a black tee shirt, a vacuum cleaner and 1 cigarette’s worth of free sunshine. The enemy of sharp imagery at this stage seems to be light sneaking around under the black areas of the acetate, Stickee gave loads of tips, does and dont’s and tricks to minimise the risk of producing a crap screen.


Printing the reversed image on acetate



Duvet Covers - not just for housewives



Burning the screen, vacuum holding good!



Rinsing photographic emulsion off the screen

After all that care and cautious processing to ensure a blemish free image with sharp edges, no dust specks, nothing missing, the fun and quick bit is slapping around the ink at the screen printing stage, we all got a fling at that. Curiously, while the objective of printing the acetate is to get as much black ink as possible out of the nozzle, the nature of the vinyl paper and the ink are such that you actually need to be quite sparing with the ink at the screen printing stage, who’d have thought?




Then there is the cutting, which is computer driven on a digital blade cutter, this actually cuts the sticker but not the backing paper behind, must be pretty sensitive and/or clever. This is where the registration marks on the sheet are very important so that the optical device on the print head can find out exactly where the image on the computer screen is located on the sheet of paper. Best way to be wowed by this precision cutting is to look at Stickee’s own youtube video below.


Sticker contour cutter



video by Stickee


The Finished Product - main image attributed to ARREX


The gallery walls had a lush looking selection of various stickers produced by stickee, see below, as well as several intriguing "making of" demonstrators such as this collection showing the four screens used to produce the famous TEK 33 trident stickers.


Top left to bottom right: pink layer, red layer, yellow layer, black layer


Like all these things, the technology is impressive and it is quite an eye opener to see the skill and length of time involved in producing even a single layer sticker. Anyone at the workshop could go home and have a fair stab at producing top quality stickers but as always the art is actually more important than the medium, so without a big flow of ideas probably your best bet is to let Stickee do it, Graffoto has known for a long time that his work is about the cheapest and highest quality!


Stickers by Mighty Mo, Aida, Nylon, Sweet Toof, Mr Penfold, Stickee, available from High Roller Society

Links:
Stickee Facebook
Stikee Flicker
High Roller Society
Arrex

Heavy Artillery - Haters

Prescription Art Gallery
Brighton, England
22 Oct 2009 -

all photos: NoLionsInEngland


Heavy Artillery, awesome top end graffiti writers have opened their first whole crew show in Prescription Art’s gallery in Brighton. This show takes place in a distressed and dilapidated former music library with scene-of-the-crime tripod lighting, unlit external toilets and no running water, so a graff crew is bound to feel comfortable.


Heavy Artillery Haters


The derelict feel and distressed textures of the large single room floors and cavernous basement create an ideal ambience for graffiti art. Upon entering at ground level the first explosion of colour and elaborate writing comes from three floor to ceiling pieces by Giroe, Gary and Roid. Giroe and Gary look more or less exactly as they would on a street wall, a crisp clean riot of colour.


Giroe - large piece on multiple canvas matrix


Roid’s writing outdoors takes the law of the letter and throws the law away, deconstructing the alphabet to the point of virtual illegibility to all but the most tutored eyes so it is a surprise that for this indoor show he has gone for a less wild word form, making the lettering more legible whilst setting them against a backdrop belching comic style smoke trails.


Gary, Roid – large pieces on multiple canvas matrix



Roid

Another bit of Heavy Artillery info, there are twelve members of the HA crew, 9 of them have work in the show – Alert, Rench and Relay missing. Upstairs the standout piece is a combined mural and installation by HA’s friend INSA. Its centrepiece is a dulled down version of the chrome arse from his “Looking For Love In The Wrong Places” show set into a circular black and white vortex flanked on either side by female posteriors , each caressed by a hand whose nail paint features a mash-up of the classic INSA pink, black and white stripy heels, a pair of which adorned a suitably willowy lady enjoying the show. INSA has enjoyed a trigonometric exercise by creating a visually complete circle drawn across a floor and ceiling each intersecting a half cylinder recess, a interesting multi-dimensional draughting challenge.


INSA – Live The Dream, Feel The Magic


Giroe, aka Jiroe in the world of graff which encourages writers to vary the spelling of their name for greater opportunity to play with letters, has created a multi-media portrait which is mainly spray painted on the wall but the eyes are light up by swirling projected fractals, whilst the teeth change colours in a way that would have dentists taking up drugs. Very psychedelic.


Giroe


Gebes has done the half-height burner on wall and integral canvasses thing, several of the canvasses are filled-in outside the graff outline with fuzzy coloured strips, a motif which re-occurs in Gebes more abstract – give or take the occasional inter-galactic astral carrot - canvasses.


Gebes



Gebes


In the basement HA crew are a touch more focussed on art created for canvas rather than across it. That said, Storm has a graff styled “S” with a faded fill and “Heavy As” tag on canvas which almost looks as if it might have been surgically extracted from a full Storm dub. If graff elements in your home is your thing then this or two other canvasses with HA tags might be picked up for only slightly more than the original release cost of a TOX print.


Storm "S"


Mr Wany has contributed three diminutive canvasses each featuring a single surreal character that share a pinched face appearance with characters often featured Mr Wany’s external walls. Letters are woven into the work both visibly and also in a very subliminal way deeply disguised in the paint, the lettering is so light it has the appearance of vestigial remnants of painted over previous work on the same canvas.


Mr Wany Red Line/W Lion/Alien God


One end of the cellar consists of a dirty wild urban graff tableau created by Odisy complete with discarded cans on the floor, picture the crazy archaeology of colours you get on an illegal wall built up from generations of throwies, tags and characters, all of which can be made out in the aerosol mix. Four large portraits on canvas blend into this backdrop but have been hung tilted from the ceiling about 2 feet forward from the background – Odisy wants to separate his art from the graff.


Odisy


Stepping back from the work reveals the characters as actually integral with the mural behind. The secrets of Odisy’s art alter ego, Alex Young are really kept close to the chest in this show with only one example of his pointilist style tucked away two floors up between INSA and Gebes.

At the opposite end of the cellar, one of the highlights of the show displayed on a rough mural featuring an assortment of his characters are the decks, canvasses and paintings on found materials contributed by Nylon, the second non HA writer and artist to be honoured with an invitation to share the HA love. A particular favourite for its rich colours, heavy paint and rough surface texture is Zulu. In the flickr show set (link below) is another pic showing the lush surface finish to better effect.


Nylon – Zulu



Nylon - deck


Twesh has been full on writing his name on a basement wall in his usual catenary style with outrageous variations in the proportions of his letters, taking one example the word stretches to scratch three canvasses, one pair, a diptych just about embrace a fragment of the “T”, the other feeds off an apparent explosion of particles (Structure 01.mb) blowing into a graphic of modernist architecture.


Twesh


The crowning touch in both sets of canvasses is Twesh’s calligraphy, written in diagonal layers, its curvaceous beauty is almost the diametric opposite to the wanton indecipherability of the graffiti’d name they spring from.


Twesh – detail


Prescription Art has a spectacular space in Brighton with perfect run-down grandeur for graffiti art shows and on all three floors the artists have made great use of the architectural nooks and crannies.


Roid, Aroe


The previous HA show at prescription Art in August was dominated by over sized graffiti names done over a wall and canvass melange and I had hoped to see more of the art skills of these graffiti writers, all of them are accomplished artists outside the graffiti genre. A large burner across a set of canvasses rarely results in anything other than crude fat cap abstracts whose individual composition is almost entirely an accident of positioning within the piece rather any particular artistic intention. Maybe the randomisation is a valid artistic device in itself but there is little doubt that this wasn’t meant as a significant conceptual exercise. Where the crew – and friends – have got out the acrylics and other materials the results have generally been exciting, it would have been great to have seen more of this.


Storm (word and cockerel), Gebes


The show is one for fans of graff and is a lot better for not behaving like it needs to create converts, when graff gets evangelical it tends to castrate itself and make tame, crowd-pleasing adjustments, thankfully Heavy Artillery haven’t felt the need to go down that route. The show title itself comes across almost as a challenge, you hate us and we don’t care.


INSA Heels (models own)


The un-even localised gallery lighting makes photographing this shit a bit tricky, it’s pretty certain that the colours showing up in the flicks are probably not the colours you would see with the naked eye in daylight.

Regrettably with a lot to gas on about this ended up too long to include relevant street pieces. Check out a big collection of the HA street work on Heavy Artillery’s crew flickr.


7th Letter (AWR/MSK crews aka Graffiti Gods, Roid and Aroe are members)


Likewise, Nylon’s stuff here. INSA has a website yer. Finally, this write up contains more photos of HA pieces that it does the art work, check my show flicks here for some more HA art.