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

Burning Candy - Getting High, Battering Clouds in 2010

all photos: NoLionsInEngland except Romanywg where stated


One of the joys of cycling to work is chancing across fresh graff and street art. This morning, even with only half an eye for walls, rooftops and side alleyways I found two unexpected specimens of Burning Candy rooftop freshness.


Firstly, thanks to a minor deviation down a route I don't take often, there was this pair of freezing monkeys.


Mighty Mo


Then in the 3 lane mayhem at Kings Cross, a glance skywards revealed this beautiful collection.


Mighty Mo, Gold Peg, Tek33


These high spots Burning Candy are hitting aren't your so-remote-its-as-safe-as-legal zones, we are talking high in the clouds and high eyeball count, that’s Kings Cross above and the one below is London's Oxford Street.


Mighty Mo, Gold Peg


Prominent in all this rooftop activity have been Gold Peg and Mighty Mo. Gold Peg is setting new standards for girls on rooftop illegals, matching the boys cojones for cojones.


Burning Candy in force


Graffoto believes most of the rooftop jobs featured in this post have been done in the past couple of months, Kings Cross is part of my daily bicycle rat run and I didn’t spot that Kings Cross nest-feathering yesterday. [edit: found someone's flick dated yesterday]


Mighty Mo, Gold Peg


To us who gawp in admiration from ground level, it is fascinating to ponder the logistics of access and the elevating (literally) joy of painting with panoramic views of the surrounding rooftops and the streets below. That thought brings Will Robson-Scott’s rooftop photography to mind for capturing some of that buzz but we’ll leave that until we finish the Graffoto Crack and Shine review, if and when we can be arsed (if you can’t wait, check out Art Of The State’s review, we are coming from exactly the same angle and wild appreciation) [update: Crack and Shine Review].


Gold Peg, Sweet Toof


Its getting hard to recall a time when various members of the crew weren’t getting up on walls around London but this current burst of graff creativity seems to go back to this epic legal wall painted by all BC bar Cept who was flat out on his solo show (LLB’s contribution was un-finished due to man-flu and painted over). Photo by epic art and urbex photography legend Romanywg.


Burning Candy - photo Romanywg

Big up Burning Candy, keeping it real and getting high in 2010.

click here for other flicks of Burning Candy on manouevres high off ground

Update Wednesday 20th: Looked over my shoulder as I cycled through Kings X this morning to see if there was a fixed ladder for Peg to get up to that balcony on the spire (there wasn't one). I then remembered the golden rule of graff spotting, bit like life: wherever you are going, always look over your shoulder!

Subway Art 25th Anniversary Edition

I thought that as a reference book and an X-ray shot into a counter culture that generally is inclined to shun publicity, Subway Art could not be bettered. Sitting with the 30cm x 43cm 25th anniversary addition on my knees (the book – not me) I conclude that as a photograph album this new edition just blows your socks off.







When I looked at the picture above I wondered if it was just the irregular lighting in my irregular kitchen that made the colour of the old book photos look a bit richer but a close comparison reveals the truth. At the larger scale the over-saturation of some of the colours is reduced and you can see more of the detail of the graff archaeology seeping through from the pieces underneath that have been gone over. Obviously, you can only really prove that with the Mk I eyeball, the pics you look at here have been distorted by being captured on the camera, buggered about with the flickr resolution compromises and then knackered by displaying on whatever device you use to read this. This picture is a detail of the L in a BLADE piece, old edition above, anniversary edition below.




The launch and signing graced by the presence of Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant and Blade drew a legendary attendance of current graffiti writers and London Ol Skool (HAN – “Court and Social” page on this blog?).


Blade, Chalfant, Cooper. Sweet Toof canvas behind.


Interestingly, along with pages from the book being displayed on the wall, some huge canvasses painted by members of the Burning Candy crew provided their own stylistic and lyrical interpretation of a few of the historic and renowned images from Subway Art. Gorgeous stuff. And the Burning Candy guys had to queue like the rest to get their new books signed.


TEK 33 - Subway Fiction



Rowdy - "Train-surfing Mouse"



TEK 33 - Night Of The Denoms

Burning Candy Show

Sartorial Gallery, London
15 Oct – 11th Nov 2008
photos NoLionsInEngland unless stated

Something of huge significance is afoot when you open your week-to-view pocket diary (luddite alert) on Monday lunchtime and find that despite clashing with an England world cup qualifier there is there is barbed wire around a Wednesday evening do. That event is the Burning Candy show, christening Sartorial Gallery’s new premises in the apparently “growing art location” of Kings Cross (street evidence: one ancient Obey Mao paste up and a Tox 03 tag).

Having some art schooling allied to a hardcore collective spirit it is not surprising that Burning Candy – or Before Chrome, various pseudonyms are interchangeable – get some highly accomplished emulsion and spray pieces all over East London, not to mention Bristol and various other locations. The dilemma is not so much where to find evidence of the street pedigree as to sift and shake and generally reduce the selection of street piece down to a short list of photos.


Burning Candy, Brick Lane, London. Photo: HowAboutNo



Burning Candy, Regents Canal, London. Photo: HowAboutNo


First question to be addressed is what and who is Burning Candy? A tight collective of street artists centred around Sweet Toof, Cyclops and Tek 33 but occasionally extending to Rowdy and recently also Gold Peg. In contrast, most of the works in the show are attributed to the individual members with just a few given as joint between Sweet Toof and Cyclops.


Burning Candy feat Rowdy



Burning Candy feat. Gold Peg



Burning Candy/Sickboy, photo: HowAboutNo



Burning Candy/Mighty Mo, photo: HowAboutNo


On the streets the most obvious characteristics of a Burning Candy piece are those gums and the skull, though attribution is not always as obvious as it seems as occasionally if one member’s signature element is required but that vandal is missing, his federate crims will happily fill in the piece in his style.


Burning Candy & DScreet


Turning attention indoors, the most striking piece upon entering the space is an installation of text and tags on a variety of bits of wood mainly sign boards, though car body panels and toy prams are also thrown into the melee. The installation has a higher typographic content than the typical street work.


Craft Spasms


The show is delicately balanced between sculptural pieces and paintings, though the physical space is bisected by a floor painted cri de coeur which also repeats in small details in some of the installations, highly relevant giving the Stalinist buffing underway on London’s East End streets in recent months.


Fuck The Buff


Although Burning Candy are a tight knit crew and gets up as a single entity, the hand of each individual member can usually be distinguished. Sweet Toof’s work is characterised by a cartoonish aesthetic, plenty of anatomical detail, an un-expected amount of detail such as in painted cloth fabrics and of course those gummy grins, without which the Sweet Toof work could be seen as referencing the Mexican dia de los meurtos.


Daisy Daisy I, II and III – Sweet Toof


A quartet of large canvasses present himself and Cyclops as some pair of muttering old codgers who, thanks to the gums, obviously have a wicked sense of the bizarre, Cyclops and Sweet Toof ARE Statler and Waldorf.



Bloody Critics – Sweet Toof


A repeating theme in Sweet Toof’s work whether on the streets or indoors is a pre-occupation with innards. On the streets the most notable example is this manacled skeleton on the site of the “This Is Not A Bar” squat, apologies for the obstructions in the photos but those intestines reach the floor then meander around the architecture – the character looks like he is plagued by serious gut rot.


Burning Candy, Sclater St, London


Gizzards are worked in amusing ways into many of the Sweet Toof paintings though the comedy muff on some of the scarier looking sculptures doesn’t bear close examination


Bad Guts – Sweet Toof


A Burning Candy creation featuring frequently on the streets is Lenny The High Roller, his components parts are usually gums by Sweet Toof, skull head by Cyclops and sometimes hats or other decorations by street luminaries such as DScreet and Sickboy,


Love And Hate – Sweet Toof & Cyclops


Sweet Toof’s work seems to be the most prominent within the show though, as with the street work, it is possible that elements are contributed by the Burning Candy cohorts.

TEK 33 appears less frequently in the street works than Sweet Toof and Cyclops, mainly due to having better things to do in a Scandinavian sense. When he works on canvas he tags the piece using his real name, James Jessop, maybe Sweden has no extradition treaty with the Met. Tek 33’s three pronged motif is a familiar element in the Burning Candy street work though for this show, Jessop has taken Pink Panther from the film credits as his cartoon character of choice and worked the Pink Panther features into the three pronged tag



Jessop has baggsed three corners of the room for very large and acid bright canvasses, including this piece in reverence of late NY ‘80s legend Basquiat.


Samo – James Jessop
(nb The dog lost the staring contest)


Cyclops’ canvasses have a finer indeed almost academic approach, being cluttered with streams of conscious wordplay, invented band names and references to half realised situations and un-finished slogans. The text makes fascinating reading, in the way of someone slowly tuning a radio hears snatches of music and conversations before moving on.


Sons Of Super Significance - Cyclops


Cyclops’ typographic content doesn’t get in the way of ploughing an animator/cartoon illustrator furrow, particularly with the Peanuts characters Charlie Brown and friend Marcie who appear on canvas and in sculpture


Black Chicks - Cyclops


Moving on to the sculptures, a pair of stick characters extend limbs across the floor and will trip up the un-wary. The bodies are built up from what look like found objects including ancient brass oil cans, wood boxes (and sticks) and then erratically coated with a white paste and garnished with all kinds of shiny beads and objets trouve. The obligatory gums and skeletal dark orbs form the eyes, heads and teeth.


Vagina Denta – Sweet Toof



Hunter Gatherer – Sweet Toof


Burning Candy is mutated anomaly in being a graff crew with its origin and output more in a street art vibe rather than can control Puritanism of graffiti writing. This show accomplishes that rare feat in the street/gallery cross over of reaching an appropriate gallery standard quality of work yet successfully capturing the high colour and energy of their street work.


Burning Candy caramelised

Visit the dentist – pics of lots more gums, skulls and lady’s bits from the show here

But on a lighter note. . .

Some amazing stuff happening around the waterways as of late :)