Here is how I stencilled my latest piece entitled the Tokyo Commute. This piece was done for the Tandoori Hotel art show (Aug 1, 2009).

Well first some background. I recently came back from a trip to Tokyo and although it was an amazing city I had noticed certain things about the culture there. Japanese men and women work extremely hard. They work long hours. It is common to work until 10 or 11pm on weekdays there. When they are off work often times it is expected of them to go out drinking with their co-workers. Because of this they often miss the last train home and are forced to sleep in the train stations. Here are some photos I took of Japanese business men sleeping in train stations. (remember, these are not bums, they are regulars like me and you).

here’s another…

and another….

finally here is a video i took on the morning subway of an entire row of Japanese Business people sleeping on the train.

So basically I wanted to capture this part of their culture in my piece. In order to do this I used the above video. First I had to take individual frames of the movie and splice them together. Like so…

and now i use photoshop to stitch them together. Be careful of the problem areas where the seams occur. I had to match it up as best as possible…

We then desaturate the image to make it black and white. Take note of the trouble spots in Red…we will have to take care of those with some photoshop trickery.

here is a picture I took of the side of a taxi cab. it had the cute Japanese police mascot “pipo” on it. Not sure what the writing says since I don’t read Japanese but it will still fit nicely in our trouble spot…

now i seperate each color into it’s own layer. there are 4 colors: black, darkgrey, lightgrey, and white:

Now we have to decide how big to make this thing. I like making huge pieces because to me they are just more visually impressive. So i decide to make this particular canvas 8 FEET long. yes that’s right, a whopping 8 feet. that way the people in the painting are almost life size. unfortunately there are no art stores that sell canvases that big, so I have to build the canvas myself. You will need 4 stretcher bars, primed or un-primed canvas, and a staple gun.

lay the assembled stretcher bars on top of the canvas like so. then using the staple gun, staple down the canvas in an alternating fashion. here is a little diagram for the order of stapling.. remember to stretch it as tight as possible…

annnnd..where finally done. my fingers were killing me after this..

ok now that that’s out of the way we can begin tracing. print out each layer of the stencil. then I use a projector to enlarge the image onto large bristol boards. I then carefully trace each layer. here is a shot of what i’m talking about…

now comes the cutting. use a regular exacto knife. buy a pack of like 10 blades because you will go through them quickly..

….keep cutting away. maybe put on a good movie to help pass the time. but one that you’ve seen before so that you don’t get too distracted. It also helps to have the printed out layers handy so you can reference them..

Once the cutting is done, it’s time to paint. you will need the 4 different colors of spray can. i use Montana hardcore because it’s the best. you will also need some thin caps. and maybe 1 big cap for the first black layer..

Buy yourself a filter mask and use it. Sometimes graff artists will not use masks because it’s “uncool” or they simply like the “romantic” smell of the fumes. But don’t be an idiot, those fumes are crazy toxic. Also, a pair of latex gloves helps to keep paint off your fingers. you can buy these at the dollar store.

Now then, the first layer is black. This is easy, just paint the whole thing black. use even strokes and just get it all filled in and solid looking. remember to paint the edges too.

then do the dark grey on top of the black.

then light grey ..

and finally white…

and here is the final product!
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don’t forget to sign it! i like to sign the back only so as not to take away anything from the painting itself..

and that’s it! thanks for reading if you actually read this whole thing. You can see the piece in real life and in all it’s 8 foot glory at tomorrow’s art show entitled Tandoori Hotel! here is the flyer and some details. Hope to see you there!

-Dan aka. Danskee