In the beginning...

In 1983, several things influenced me to getting in to Hip Hop.

First Toni Basil had a TV show aired on the BBC in which she had a feature on The Rock Steady Crew, and that got me hooked on breakin'. My brother started listening to electro and I regularly heard Rockers Revenge coming from his room.

Then Channel 4 showed the documentary 'Style Wars' in the Another America season and that blew my mind.

My friend Andrew Cakebread came to school after the holidays wearing a padded Nike Cagoule saying he was a breaker and had a walkman playing Streetsounds Crucial Electro and I had a listen and loved it.

Tony and I started learning how to break at school and we met up and practiced in an alley behind the local shops with some other mates from school.

We decided to give graffiti a go too. Probably because we had seen a copy of Subway Art - I remember I had bought a copy very early on around this time. We formed a crew with Tony, myself and Cakebread and called ourselves 'The Dynamic Sprayers'. We got some paint from the local hardware shop and designed a piece. We found a good 'safe' wall next to the railway in Aylesford and started spraying straight on to a damp wall. The colours were not too bright as the paint soaked in, and we had a grid in the design that added perspective intended to be neon in style (very 80's).

I had got a pot of white emulsion from my dads garage and only had enough for these lines! So that's all we painted - the lines were bright and the rest a bit dull.

Our piece was soon 'gone over' by a neighbouring crew from Snodland (Subway Service) and being incensed that our area had been invaded, we spent the next 6 months or so locked in battle with them. We were outclassed as we'd just begun but we made good progress in our style and can control during this time.

The first decent piece we really did was 'Kings of Kent'. Although a bit wobbly in translating the design to large scale, the drips had stopped and the blending was pretty good - especially as we were using car paint.

We were very proud of this piece and kept coming back to look at it. It wasn't long however before it was written over by our rivals.

A.M.E. - 15th December 2006

This was for another High Jinx party at the River Bar in Maidstone.

The manager had liked organising graffiti competitions previously and I had taken part in one (but was disqualified due to my 20 odd years experience).

We only had a small board so I designed an AME piece to fit. I wanted to do a variation of 3D and came up with a Terry Gilliam-esque design.

I wanted to do an exaggerated perspective on the letters and not do an outline for once. I had been lazy and just done something quickly before, but this time wanted to experiment and do something that was a bit different to what is expected of me - a typical 'Shade2 piece'.

Again it was bitterly cold and we had all kinds of distractions going on with the party inside the bar.

I was planning to do a face on the side in a Mount Rushmore kind of way, but by the time I had mastered the letters and got the 3D right it was late and I was knackered!

Blade Runner Theme - Late Dec 2006

After the success of the High-Jinx evenings at the River Bar in Maidstone, Bernz and I were asked to do a piece with a Blade Runner theme for the New Years party. The promotion had a strong iconography with the movie, using the Blade Runner font and themes on the flyers and publicity.

I grabbed a familiar image that I had on the cover of a book about the making of Blade Runner. I wanted a photo real image to try to translate as I've wanted to incorporate this kind of detail in to my graffiti for some time.

It was bitterly cold (being late December), and to my surprise, Gaz rang me up and had come to visit me and was round my house, whilst I was painting.

It's a pity this image can't capture the detail we managed to achieve, as the street below had some good touches, especially the flashing lights on the 'Spinner' cop cars flying along, and the rain effects from slashing spray paint across the board.

The Dark Side August 2007

Bernz was approached to arrange the graffiti for the Maidstone 'Peace One Day' festival to be held in Maidstone Millennium Park. He arranged for his mate Morgan to come down to do one of his complex backgrounds and naturally asked me to do a piece too.

I felt that I needed to do something a bit 'out of the ordinary' to get attention, and after consulting with my wife Nadia, I came up with a design that incorporated Darth Vader.

We had to go and buy sheets of chipboard from the local DIY superstore before we started, so we got a lift with the organiser in his people carrier down to Wickes in town.

We set up up on the slope in full view of everyone near the bandstand, and Morgan was attracting the better comments as people walked past and observed. I was taking my time trying to get the painstaking detail right. I found that I had to constantly keep stepping back and making sure that all parts of the mask were in perspective as it just didn't look right if there was the slightest inconsistency. This took ages but I was bloody determined to get it right, as it was such a familiar character to people and they'd notice any fault.

As I finished the face of Vader and started the lettering, Barry and I started getting excited about it and had a laugh pointing out our favourite bit of the piece. As I was finishing, people liked it so much that we were getting generous offers to buy it from us, but as we'd already promised it to the organiser (who was paying us) we had to let it go :-(

Art Made Easy

Art Made Easy comprises of myself (Shade2), Chaos and Bernz. We have been graffin' as a crew for ten years, and Chaos and myself since 1985.

I have known Chaos since we were six years old, although we didn't really start hanging out until we were in secondary school. We got in to Hip-Hop the usual way in about 1984 through Breakin and graffiti. Throughout the 80's and 90's we alternated between Breakin' and graffiti with a leniency toward graffiti.

The evolution of my graffiti has been due to the people I have graff'd with over the years, people who have moved on, got married or I've just lost contact with.

I especially owe a lot to Gaz who taught me a lot, and showed me graffiti styles from all over including Wolverhampton, Birmingham and London. Although he was a B-Boy and just liked to fill-in when we did a piece, I always seemed to do my best stuff with him.

I'll post these at some point along with everything up to now with a description of what I remember, from designing to spraying each piece.