Welcome back to our Street Art blog 😊
Today we’re talking about one of the world’s most popular Italian street artists and their innovative technique, Sten Lex and the Stencil Poster!
Starting in the 2000s, the artists Sten & Lex developed a new technique that they called Stencil Poster, which has become their trademark.
From the name ‘Stencil Poster’ we can tell that it combines two of the most popular techniques used by street artists – stencil and poster.
Without knowing it, we can’t fully appreciate their work, so let’s discover it together!
Stencil Poster: the steps
1) First, Sten and Lex create their composition, which is printed on black and white paper – like a poster 😉
2) Then they glue the poster on the surface where they are going to realize their work, a wall if it is an outdoor intervention or a panel for studio works.
3) At this point, they follow the lines of the print with a cutter and cut out and remove all the blacks, leaving the white portions of the poster intact and glued to the support.
4) Once this meticulous engraving work is finished, they use a roller to cover the entire surface with black paint. The poster now becomes like the matrix of a stencil, letting the colour pass only at the cut-outs.
5) Once the paint has dried, they remove what remains of the poster/matrix. The paper cut-outs that are peeled back recreate the white areas and slowly allow the initial design to re-emerge.
Sten Lex – Stencil Poster, an innovative technique
Stencils and posters are widely used by street artists because they allow them to create their work quickly, whereas the stencil poster is a very time-consuming technique.
Moreover, Sten Lex with their innovative method reverse the logic of reproducibility of the stencil. If in Stencil Art the stencil is used to replicate the subject over and over again, in Stencil Poster the stencil is destroyed in the process.
Extraordinary technique, don’t you think? 😉
If you are curious to find out more about Sten Lex – works and other curiosities – please contact us!