I did this original piece in 1997, during my last year of high school. At the time I remember being extremely proud of this piece because it was both a freestyle and done with all my scrap cans. Back then we didn't have access to any good brands in NZ which was a good and bad thing. Having lower material standards meant anything we could rack we would definitely use. Usually the brands were Plasti- Kote, Power Plus, Spray Kote (our only locally made brand, now defunct) and if we were super lucky we would get our hands on a Tana or Tuxan can for outline. I think the outline on this was a Tana Black from memory. The random method of my paint gathering explains this combo somewhat reminiscent of a fruit salad gone wrong. I had all the good colours in there but little understanding of contrast vs. complimentary colours. I just banged them all into the fill in any order I could and hoped the black outline would be enough to make it pop. The style of this piece was based on a lot of what was going down locally at the time, although such a bad imitation that I won't shame the writers that I was trying to emulate haha! This wall never got finished hence the rough buff out in the background and Webs' tag saying "get painting!"

When it came to doing the new revised piece I had a long think about what the old piece had going for it stylistically first. The answer was unfortunately, not much! This piece has nearly every element in pieces I hate today and it was a both a laugh and an extremely humbling experience to really analyse where I was truly at back then. If you had asked me on the day I would've told you I was a "mean writer!!" haha! The main thing with the 'A' is it's got a backwards lean, which I like because normally I tilt the top of my 'A' towards my 'S', hardly ever this type of rock. The sad thing is I had no concept of Swing and getting the most out of the letters back then, each Letter just sat static in it's little place. I decided if I could improve on this piece at all I would start with swinging it right out. I tried to keep the Stars but only ended up with one clearly visible at the end. Wherever a letter had a kick out in the original I tried to keep that the same and used the same basic structure for fitting the letters together but just in a more improved method, like I guess in the way I would just do it today. As for colours, I tried to keep them the same or as much as possible, but obviously took all the dark greens out of the fill and put them into the background this time. One major addition is the Yellow 3D, I added this because back in the day I never did 3D's on hardly any of my pieces! I always did drop shadows for some reason. If I could improve any of my older joints it would be to add a 3D and in this case a fairly tricky lil' one that gives the illusion of the piece twisting. That's just another way of making it swing more and look less static on the wall. The Thick green band around the piece remains from the earlier one. I like that aspect.

Anyway, that's about it.. hahaha! geek shit!