Style combination · Pairs well
Pop Art Graphics × Stencil Street Art
Both repeat an appropriated photograph through a stencil; add Pop's serial grid or one off-register accent colour to turn a single street figure into a print edition.
Mix them and make something Pop Art Graphics Stencil Street Art
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Pop Art Graphics Stencil Street Art
- Colour from Pop Art Graphics
- Form from Pop Art Graphics
- Composition from Stencil Street Art
- Surface from Pop Art Graphics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Stencil Street Art
Wow.
Black Ops One, standing in for Industrial and military marking stencils (crate and serial-number lettering; Banksy has said a stencilled serial number prompted his switch to stencils)
Text · Pop Art Graphics
Pop turned the commercial imagery of post-war consumer culture (comics, packaging, celebrity photographs and advertising) into both its subject and its method. Images are appropriated, enlarged, flattened and repeated; colour is bright and unmodulated; and the printing process itself, from Ben-Day dots to off-register silkscreen, is left visible as a sign of mass production.
Archivo; Pop Art Graphics used Comic-book hand lettering and Franklin Gothic
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Pop Art Graphics, with a counter-accent from Stencil Street Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Pop Art Graphics Stencil Street Art
-
#fbf8f0ground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#ffd400accent · 18% -
#d3212daccent · 14% -
#e10600accent · 10% -
#e9d9a6accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #fbf8f0;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #ffd400;
--accent-2: #d3212d;
--accent-3: #e10600;
--accent-4: #e9d9a6;
--font-display: "Black Ops One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Stencil Street Art: Spraying a wall without the owner's consent is vandalism or criminal damage in most jurisdictions, so get permission or a legal wall; a brand faking street stencils is no exception (IBM's 2001 'Peace, Love, and Linux' sidewalk stencils led to arrests and more than US$120,000 in fines). Most stencils start from someone else's photograph, as the AP's dispute over Fairey's Hope poster showed (settled 2011): shoot or license the source image, and do not pass off a pastiche as a Banksy, whose work is authenticated only by Pest Control. Do not use photographs of real victims, or places of real suffering such as separation walls and war ruins, as props for a brand or a joke; by Banksy's own account, a Palestinian man at the West Bank barrier told him they did not want the wall made beautiful.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Pop Art Graphics
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Set one loud appropriated Pop image inside a strict grid with a neutral grotesque so the irony reads as deliberate rather than chaotic.
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics Contrasts · Where Pop multiplies glossy commodities, wabi-sabi values the single worn object; use one to puncture the mood of the other.
- Guna Mola Pairs well · Guna women redraw brand logos and cartoons (RCA Victor, Bullwinkle) in reverse appliqué; let that act of translation inspire Pop work, but buy or commission molas rather than imitating them.
- Neo-Brutalism Pairs well · Lift Pop's thick black outlines and flat primaries into UI cards and buttons for a confident, comic-strip interface.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print Ben-Day dot screens in fluorescent pink and yellow riso inks to give Pop's mass-media imagery a small-run, handmade warmth.
- Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Pairs well · Shepard Fairey called Kozik 'the punk rock Warhol'; take Pop's appropriated cartoons and halftones and give them a gig poster's single idea and hand-lettered title.
- Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism) Pairs well · Contemporaries in saturated flat colour at a giant scale; borrow pop's isolated, enlarged object for a poster, but drop its halftone and irony to keep Marimekko's sincerity.
- Superflat Contrasts · Both turn commodities into art; take Pop's repetition and frontal commodity but swap its halftone and off-register silkscreen for Superflat's smooth vector fills and anime characters, so the print process disappears.
With Stencil Street Art
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Contrasts · Both use spray paint in the street, but graffiti makes the writer's name a freehand, many-coloured letter-sculpture with 3D blocks and fades; stencil art sprays a reproducible photographic picture in black. Decide which one the brief needs before mixing them.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Stencil art borrows the repetition and reach of branding to mock it, as OBEY parodies advertising; a black figure sprayed beside a clean corporate mark makes the question of who owns public space visible.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Stencilling grew out of punk (Kaagman's fanzine scene, Crass's Underground slogans); pair a sprayed figure with xerox collage and ransom-note lettering for a flyer or sleeve with the same anti-authority edge.
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Fairey's Obey posters borrow Soviet propaganda's red, black and cream and its heroic portrait; give a stencilled face a red bar and a one-word slogan for agitprop with a knowing twist.
- Lambe-Lambe Posters (Brazilian Paste-Up Street Posters) Pairs well · Both descend from or sit beside graffiti culture in the street; pair a pasted series with a painted element only where a project needs both.
- Chinese Paper-Cut (Jianzhi) Pairs well · Both depend on bridges that hold every island of the design to the sheet; give a spray stencil the paper-cut's folded symmetry and saw-tooth texture.
- BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Contrasts · Stencils bring their own imagery to the wall; BUGA UP takes the wall's existing imagery and turns it.
- Extinction Rebellion Graphics Pairs well · ESP spread the symbol as a street artist before XR adopted it, chalking it on Brick Lane and putting up posters and tiles around East London; pair XR's one-colour emblem and short slogans with stencil street art's hard-edged sprayed figures for walls and pavements.