Man Made DIY

If you simply must express your voice on a giant piece of public property, but can't get passed the illegality of defacing something you don't own, try scrubbing your design into the grime that already exists on the wall.

"Offering a refreshing and very welcome take on the contentious art form, is a group of ex Durban Vega Brand and Communications School students, who were inspired by the work of British street artist Paul Curtis (AKA “Moose”) who began pioneering his form ‘Green’ or ‘reverse Graffiti’ three years ago. Curtis (legend has it) first hit upon the idea while working as a kitchen porter in a restaurant scrubbing mountains of pots and pans. One dreary evening while trying to erase a grease stain on the sink wall before him, he discovered he had cleaned a large white patch onto the grimy surface. It didn’t take long before the aspirant street artist began conquering the cityscapes of London, applying his vigorous selective scrubbing to more prominent walls and bridges."

I refuse to read email forwards and chain letters. Even if they're actually hilarious, or educational, I simply skip past them on principal...sorry, Dad.

Well, except for one. Each year, around this time of year, someone passes along a collection of the macabre snow art of Calvin and Hobbes, and I'm instantly transported back to the heyday of Bill Watterson's excellent work, and I'm thankful to have been a kid in the eighties and early-nineties.

And I'm also thankful for these clever, cold-weather peers, who've taken some inspiration from young Calvin and made their own real life nightmare-ish… read more

So...I'm pretty sure this is illegal in every state, but art is supposed to be edgy, and playing with imagery as recognizable as the most common of street signs is pretty effective. As the mind behind StopSignArt says "Because I have a digital camera and bandwidth, and Seattle has a lot of stop signs."

And whether you agree with the act or not, you can't help but be amused and challenged by this collection of stop sign additions assembled by DamnCoolPics.

… read more

So, first, a quick primer. King Robbo was a pioneering graffiti artist in London in the 1980s. He painted this piece at Regents canal in Camden, London in 1985, and it's remained untouched since: