The Personal Blog of Dr Banksy*.

Well folks, here we are. After 12 long, arduous weeks of frankly fabulous work, I've got my final display ready for Weston's summer art show. Mounting the pieces was quite meticulous, but I managed to get them looking pretty good with the help of a few chums. Using a craft knife to get some of the air bubbles out of the vinyl worked well - just a small incision to allow somewhere for the air to escape to, and then simply pushing the air out with a finger. Nice and easy, and doesn't look half bad. Here's the completed Spy vs. Spy piece. I also added a small information plaque to give some background info about both pieces. This was very easily done via the use of Microsoft Publisher's text box tool, applying a 4pt stroke, bevel-design border, and spray-mounting each printed-to-paper design onto some foam mount board (the same stuff I used for my spray-painted scissor stencils, which I dotted around the piece). I had to think carefully about the position of the...

In order to create a couple of Banksy-esque final pieces, I decided to study not just the artist himself, but also his relation to the graffiti scene. This would help me to find my rhythm with the project, sparking the generation of ideas and keeping the artistic process fresh, exciting and interesting. I had visited the Bristol museum as part of a casual family trip and was able to pick up a couple of books on Banksy in order to fulfill these two research aims. I began with a book which describes Banksy's relation to graffiti culture, and also into the inner workings of the movement itself. Banksy: The Bristol Legacy (edited by Paul Gough and published in 2012) delved into this in great detail, comprising the viewpoints of a range of people (including art critics and university researchers) on Banksy and graffiti, as well as a very informative history of graffiti in Bristol. I've learned that Bristol has been attached to the graffiti movement for far longer than I had orig...

Laser cut stencils of my scissors design are now finished. I simply took the layers of design which I'd previously made up in Illustrator and spaced them out. I had to check for any double paths which might have resulted from the spacing out process - these needed to be deleted. The Illustrator file was then sent via memory stick to a PC connected to the college's laser cutter (see below).  The designs were then put into laser cutting software (similar to 2D Design). Either the copying over or issues with the raw file itself resulted in a few instances of "double paths" (extra cutlines layered over the originals) which needed to be removed. This was easy to do (via use of the "Delete" key), but very important because cutting a line twice over into 3mm MDF with a laser cutter that could probably do with a good servicing presents the slight risk of an inferno .  The laser cutter works by firing a laser beam through a focusing lens which is mixed...

Who knew that doing nothing could be so exhausting? The printing of my final pieces is now finished. A quick jaunt over to Knightstone campus on the other side of town, and I found myself in the print room. Nothing surprising - pretty messy and running tech that was probably groundbreaking ten years ago. We were given a 1 hour 15 slot to complete all of our printing. The first sight of this was my first little worry; someone had seriously underestimated the time it takes not just to print something, but to print it right . To be fair, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the printer I was using - a Roland VP-540i. Very solid piece of kit, and it can print at a very high quality. Unfortunately, the PC that it was hooked up to was running Windows XP . Huh. Nothing wrong with XP either, but it's really not built for running complicated printing software. At all. So if you're wondering how long the printing process actually took, let me cut to the chase. We arrived at th...

*Bored of this title yet? So I'm now pretty much done with this Spy vs Spy piece. Thanks to a very helpful guide that I found online after a great deal of searching, I've been able to create die-lines around my composition's shapes (i.e. White Spy, Black Spy and the breathing mask). These are needed to show the vinyl cutter where it needs to cut around in order to create a sticker. I'm going to be using a different method to create my final piece than I'd originally thought, and it's ridiculously less time-consuming. See, I'd thought that I'd be using the vinyl cutter to cut out each of the individual vector shapes which make up my final pieces, and then layer them to create the final effect (like a stencil). However, I hadn't understood that I'm actually able to print each design straight onto white vinyl and then that in turn can be cut out all by itself to make a sticker. That means I'll only have one layer to deal with, so I'll ...