Sprite Junkyard Jam 2021
I had a fantastic weekend in Crewe, Cheshire with an amazing group of people at Urban artistry’s Junkyard Jam. Yes, it is a real, functioning scrapyard full of beautiful filth and the best kind of trash.
I have painted at this event once before with SNUB23 Back in 2019 but didn’t have a chance to paint my own piece. This year I was lucky enough to have been given my very own van to paint alongside so many other amazing graffiti and street artists.
Pretty much anything is open to being painted here, especially vehicles. A huge range of artwork is produced including old school graffiti lettering, photorealistic murals, illustrative designs as well as characters and abstract designs. All in different media like stencils, spray paint and brush!
My Graffiti Van
My design was a giant Ocelot painted all with Kobra spray paint on a messy fluorescent background, which I had to paint the day before to give it time to dry and stop all the spray paint from melting off the van.
I love big cats, (and small) and I wanted to paint something powerful striking which would catch people’s eye and make them go “WOW”
This was one of the most challenging pieces to date, especially as the van I was painting ended up being a lot smaller than I expected. All the freehand details in and around the mouth was a great learning curve.
Oh, I forgot to mention one thing… once we had finished painting. Our artwork was CRUSHED TO PIECES by a giant metal claw. it was the best thing ever. People always forget how temporary graffiti art is, it usually always has a very short life span. Crushing the van you’ve just painted is the perfect representation of graffiti’s temporary nature. As a street artist, you can never be precious about your work, it’s a tough lesson to learn, but without that understanding, you can lose touch with the actual meaning of street art and become pretty disgruntled when your artwork disappears, gets painted over, vandalised or crushed into a thousand pieces.
Watch my Graffiti Van get crushed in the video below
How about in slow motion?
Thank you so much Mike AKA Spray Days for the fantastic event (and the pizza!)