Piece Books were books you made Graffiti in, where you tested out your style, practiced your tag, and planned to do it for real with spray paint. They were usually re-appropriated blank school books which were obviously free. These were worked in and exchanged in the playground, where you’d work in someone else’s book and visa versa. A full Piece Book was a thing to cherish and behold, and even steal. Pics here are of piece books between 83’ and 85’ when I was around 12 -14 years old. I used felt tips, magic markers and metallic pens. There was a lot of pen dealing going on at school too, and the local art shop was on alert for berols & sharpies going into blazer pockets. And if the teachers caught you with any of this stuff it was confiscated and binned, a shame they didn’t think that a inner London kid sitting at home for hours on end being creative, doing typography, was a worthwhile pursuit…I kept doing bits of Graff until I was about 16 but these here are a selection of the more interesting naive stuff. I’d love to see a show of 80′s piece books… Happy days.
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Mine was ART… with a few regulation arrows. it was all a bit lost on us country kids though.
lovely blogging!
Yeah, gotta have lots of arrows, still use them in my work now. What a great tag ‘ART’ – Straight to the point, and so wonderfully naive, love it. Presto was ok for a bit as he was a wizard in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons, (which I didn’t actually like)… but the moniker got much worse as a new chain of VG style convenience shops opened up in London called ‘ Presto’ so my tag was paramount to being ASDA or Homebase. Not fresh or def. That’s when I became ‘Rame’. There were some great tags around our way though. One was Virus, which was clever, and then his mate was Emune 2 – and he always tagged over virus. Nice.
mine was TINMAN …cos i saw it on a wall in the film COLORS with sean penn about LA GANGS
….i had the name buckle belt too …oh dear
A buckle. That was one cool B Boy statement. TimMan is good. Can you still do your tag? I think i’ve probably lost my graffin style now.
HA! Wooooooooord! You’re so street. I’m digging the 2000AD reference PERP
Was so street. Cant even do knee spins anymore, doctors orders. I’m gonna dig some more out at some point. Seeeen.