Picking up an old habit of mine: Graffiti...

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Eindhoven, Holland.
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^ eran (by zime) ^ sexy (by me) ^ zime

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Me and my graffiti buddy Zime wanted to take a trip today to Charleroi (Belgium) to paint one or two walls of abandoned factories. But sadly it got cancelled by the guys that we were supposed to meet there. Very disappointed the two of us decided to stay in Eindhoven (Holland) to paint. We have quite a well-known hall of fame in our town and we hadn't had a piece up there since years.... We used to be pretty active back in the days with at least one piece a week each but as we all know, slowly life takes over and nobody has any time left to do the fun things we used to do. Instead of one piece a week, the last couple of years it has been one piece a year...

We had a good time today and, decided to do this more often once again...

Posing in front is my li'll hotrod roadbike that keeps on evolving.
 
Thanks.
The color did remind me of Montana indeed, but it is in fact a household latex paint. As is the greenish blue and the black. Done with brushes and rollers. After 10 years of doing traditional graffiti our crew (solcrew) started to blend in other interests in our work. For me it was the giant old handpainted wall ads, logos, pinstriping, shopwindow lettering, and scrollbrush work. Hopefully it is showing in the endresult.

Do you have experience with Montana spraypaint? It is cheap, but is it any good to use on bikes?
 
herr_rudolf said:
For me it was the giant old handpainted wall ads, logos, pinstriping, shopwindow lettering, and scrollbrush work. Hopefully it is showing in the endresult.

very influential in my life too. ive been pinstriping on and off for about a year or so now.

it definitely has a scrolly feel to it. such nice flow man. i like the "e,x" combo. and the "y" is killer! i like the overall simplicity of it. ive always wanted to paint a bike in montana or belton but i always just rusto on bikes because its right down the street at the store. but montana is so opaque and they have a huge color spectrum. ive used it a couple times. i want to do a bike in montanas gold line, with a color combo of pepperoni hot and scalloped with their carmel. with a white stripe splitter.

is montana on the shelf all over out there? or any good euro paints? its expensive for us in the states because online is the only place to get it. at least for me in the country. no way it will be in any store around here. its like 6-7 bucks a can plus shipping for me. and im poor.

keep um comin! :D
 
Yeah, I saw your oneshot work on some of the pinstriping threads. Not too shabby for just one year experience. I've had that stuff too, for years, but never got around to try pinstriping...

Are you also a graffitiwriter?

Since graffiti has become an industry there is at least one store in my town that carries Montana. They are less then $6.30 a can. I think that's an average and fair price for spraypaint. I remember using Sparvar, Belton, and Motip, next to all sorts of departementstore spraypaints for graffiti and stopped using spraycans around the time graffiti became an industry. I don't remember them being much cheaper...

For the bike you see posing in front of the pieces I used Motip car paint. It is pricey: $17.70 a can... (400ml) But it such good paint! Nice colors, real quality stuff. For my other bike I used a red-oxide primer also from Motip: $9.50 a can (big:750ml) Painting a bike takes lot's and lot's of preparation, so I don't wanna take a risk by using cheap paint. Unless someone convinces me to use a particular brand of paint. Like Montana.

The reason I asked if montana is a decent paint to color a bike is because of the beautiful colors. They are all matt/flat!! So, our bikes don't have to be primer grey/red/black...

Btw: Here are some more of our pieces in the bike-art thread:
 
The strangest thing...
Today I took a trip and rode by the pieces we did last weekend. It seemed we had some visitors from Sophia, Bulgaria. Kind of disrespecting our work by using our background color, but hey, it IS a hall of fame... Then I noticed lots of spraycans in front of their and our pieces. AND lots of beer! Three stacked trays of unopened beercans... I immediatly thought these guys were busy and still around untill I noticed this message:

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^ Leftside of our pieces...

Too bad I didn't bring my camera with me so I went home to pick it up and brought back a couple of shopping bags to bring home the pray- and beercans. When I got back, the good stuff was gone, ofcourse... All that was left were empty cans and two unopened beers. I'm not the kind to take home cans of beer I found on the side of the road but I also hate to leave a mess. Even if it isn't mine...

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^ Rightside of our pieces...
 
I grew up in San Francisco, and was part of a crew of 6.
we had a few "hall of fame" spots (psyco-city / norfolk alley)
it was pretty much common law amongst thieves that a new piece was to be left alone for about 2 weeks (unless you were Twist or ArtDeco or another big shot)
how long can you expect your work to remain untouched? (which is very nice, by the way)


I also have gone the way of the one-shot can and Mack sword :wink:
 
I went back and cleaned the whole mess up. Back to black... ;-)

theVULTURE said:
...it was pretty much common law amongst thieves that a new piece was to be left alone for about 2 weeks (unless you were Twist or ArtDeco or another big shot)
how long can you expect your work to remain untouched? (which is very nice, by the way) I also have gone the way of the one-shot can and Mack sword :wink:

Well, that used to be the law... Nowadays this hall of fame 'Berekuil' (bearpit) is getting famous of it's own. We see lot's of pieces and tags from other countries. Ofcourse Western Europe, but also Eastern Europe, Asia, and even South America. People just don't know which piece is new or old, and I can't blame them...
These Bulgarians didn't cross our pieces technically, just right against our letters. Not over them... But they knew our pieces were new because they saw us painting. Maybe it's a matter of 'cheap fame'. Some people like to think our crew are 'bigshots' too.

Sometimes pieces get painted over the very next day, others are left untouched for years, like these we did years ago:

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^ Zime, Sektie (Solcrew) 2003

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^ Zyme, Sektie-character (Solcrew) 2003

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^ Sektie-character, Zime. Same spot different angle. different season. (Solcrew) 2003

I guess you never can tell...
 
I love the simplicity and straight lines you bring to your graff
 
i really your work.

I have an old house, i would not mind having that style of paintings on it!
 
xHOBOPHOBIAx said:
I love the simplicity and straight lines you bring to your graff

Thanks! ...but most of the time the straightlines are part of the lettering of my buddy's piece. (zime)
Btw: simplicity does not equal simple... :wink:

tartosuc said:
i really your work. I have an old house, i would not mind having that style of paintings on it!

Thanks! ...and I think I really like Montreal. Just arange an airline ticket, I would not mind taking the trip to do some paintings on your house... :wink:

theVULTURE said:
I also have gone the way of the one-shot can and Mack sword :wink:

I've noticed that lot's of (ex-)graffitiwriters have gotten into either tattooing or pinstriping... 8)
 
You're a mad man Jeffrey...love your work here!

BTW...the places where you are doing this...are they designated spots that the city has given up to artists?

Trying to imagine the amount of time it would take to create one of these and not get caught if it were illegal.
 
Thanks guys!

@ Ratrod:
I guess you can call it a legal spot. These pieces are all in the same area. The hall of fame is huge. It consists of 2 bicycle roundabouts and 4 bicycle tunnels. (I'll try to find a decent pic with an 'overal view'.) It is 'legal', but it is not official. I mean, City counsil is smart enough to not write these things down, so every once in a while some bad cop want's to show his powers and harras unsuspecting graffiti writers. But that is seldom the case anymore. Nowadays you can paint for hours. But it wasn't always like that. We really had to 'fight' for this spot. It had graffiti for as long as I can remember. Crappy stuff on the visible spots and really beautifull stuff on the darker insides of the tunnels. It even has it's own chapter in one of the two 'graffiti-bibles' Spraycan Art. (Subway Art is the other 'bible' ofcourse...) In the mid-nineties we aranged one wall for a one time only project. But that got a bit out of hand... One guy painted on the opposite side of the wall, and then the tunnels got some new pieces, and then we thought: 'Okay, let's paint the inside Arena!' And now the Graffiti is all over the place in one spot, and less in the innercity. The council likes that so they don't bother 'us' anymore at the hall of fame.

A few of my friends have been arrested on that spot in the past though...

Also, the time it takes for me to put up such pieces vary. We work mostly with latex so if the air is dry and hot I could do it in two hours, but that is not always the case... Sometimes I have to get back another day, and if we do large projects with the entire crew (of six) we can be busy for days. Like these:

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^ Solcrew at Urbis in Manchester, England.

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^ Another wall we did in my hometown Eindhoven, Holland. (This wall didn't last for a week though...)

(all with work from me, Zime, Erosie, Bombkid, Late, and also Sonic and Eton.)
 
Rat Rod said:
I just don't see how anyone could paint over a wall like that...it looks incredible.

Thanks man!
I kinda feel silly about posting these old pics, but I haven't done a lot of graffiti stuff in the past couple of years. I've just been too busy with 'life'... But it feels good to paint with my friends again. It always turns into a get-together/reunion/a-good-excuse-to drink-a-beer-or-two-or-three-or... :wink:

Well... The pieces do get painted over most of the time. 'Our style' isn't always accepted by the so-called hardcore graffiti writers, because most of the time it's not done with spraycans. For several good reasons btw, like health and environmental issues. We never trew away paint. We just collected al the rest and mixed it into a 'new' color.

These are pics of that same wall taken in less than a half year period, with the first crossing-over in the first week we painted it:

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Check the hall of fame 'de Berekuil' in our town on Google Streetview (go in every direction and rotate the view):
Click here

(btw, none of these pieces you see in Streetview are ours though...)

EDIT: For people that have never used Streetview: Click and drag the 'yellow man' to the spot you wish to view. :wink:
 
I could see writers getting upset with your rollers and brushes. Pride is large in the world of graffiti.

If your piece was in a busy area, I wouldn't be upset with the out of towners getting so close. If there was tons of space, it's a little disrespectful. But the cans and beer make up for it. It's really about what is acceptable in your area. There are some spots in San Fransisco where pieces get dissed, and painted over, every other week.

There are some pieces in the Colorado Springs that are dated to the mid 90s. I would never paint right next to those.
 
Korporal said:
I could see writers getting upset with your rollers and brushes. Pride is large in the world of graffiti.

If your piece was in a busy area, I wouldn't be upset with the out of towners getting so close. If there was tons of space, it's a little disrespectful. But the cans and beer make up for it. It's really about what is acceptable in your area. There are some spots in San Fransisco where pieces get dissed, and painted over, every other week.

There are some pieces in the Colorado Springs that are dated to the mid 90s. I would never paint right next to those.

You're right. And I'm not really upset. I was however very surprised... By the stuff they'd left behind. It was a small tower of beer, lot's of new and used spraycans. I've only photographed the rubbish they've left behind. It must have been laying there for 2 days but someone took the good stuff when I was gone for an hour to pick up my camera... I don't get upset with someone going over my piece. That's the risk of painting at a hall of fame. AND, in return I'd be more than willing to restore my own piece that very same day. If I had the time (and paint) I could keep that up for months... I do get upset about leaving paint (or trash) at a hall of fame. We have fought hard to get this spot legal. It really would be a shame if this place becomes a trash dumping site. Not only because of the threat of closing down and being back at square 1, but kids and 'toys' being able to just pick a 'stray-can' of the floor and destroy the walls... I don't like to take care of someone elses thrash. But I did it anyway...

I don't really know why they painted so close next to us, but they must have a reason. There's lots of space to go over/next to 'lesser pieces'. We've figured out that these guys saw us painting so they knew our pieces were fresh. (as in 'new'.)

"Pride is large in the world of graffiti"
That's true, but it's also rediculous... I think there is nothing to be proud of since graffiti became an industry with 'urban' stores selling 'urban' fashion, as well as 'hardcore' spraycans to paint another copy, of a copy, of a copy, of a....

Pride should come from personal style. It should come from what you make. Not from the tools you make it with. imho ofcourse.

PS: Would be cool to see some pics of your halls of fame, guys! Post em if you've got em...
 
herr_rudolf said:
)

"Pride is large in the world of graffiti"
That's true, but it's also rediculous... I think there is nothing to be proud of since graffiti became an industry with 'urban' stores selling 'urban' fashion, as well as 'hardcore' spraycans to paint another copy, of a copy, of a copy, of a....

Pride should come from personal style. It should come from what you make. Not from the tools you make it with. imho ofcourse.

I totally agree. Plus if people can get famous by throwing up stencils, even cool stencils, a brush shouldn't matter.
 

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